The World - One Chicken at a Time

The Park Palace hotel is really nice.

Well, I think so. It's nicer than the places I usually book for myself when I travel. Single bed, TV, desk, my own toilet and shower, internet and most importantly: it is CLEAN! The layout of the hotel itself is something different:

If you can imagine a 2 storey square building with a large garden in the middle and a small single storey building in the middle of the garden. The entrance to the hotel is through sliding steel door, wide enough to easily get a van through, then a garage sized room, where the vehicles or people entering are searched for bombs and weapons and before being allowed through another sliding door into the centre space. Both the inside and outside doors have sandbagged security positions, with armed guards.

The hotel also has a "safe haven" a large, secure room, stocked with food and water, able to be locked against attackers to guard against attack and possible hostage taking. A good place to have your trusty sudoku book and a pen.

You would think that a hotel meeting UN security regulations for workers would be fairly grim; instead it is the opposite. The centre garden area has a lush lawn and beds of flowering roses all beautifully kept. It's peaceful and in itself a haven against the dusty, noisy, hustle and bustle of Kabul city outside.

We head out to dinner with Mike, an Australian, and Kenny, a Scot, working in Kabul. Mike has recommended the Zadar restaurant - Croatian food! We knock back a few beers and swap war stories as we eat. Fantastic food. The owner Saska is really hard-case, with a heart of gold. We book to come back the next night - that must definitely be a recommendation! If you are ever in Kabul, you won't go wrong at Zadar. Thanks Saska! [Article http://aunohita.blogspot.com/2008/04/weneews.html ]

Sadly, we have to leave and get some sleep. Unfortunately, only about 4 hours sleep. We are working long days here! Our first day starts at 03:00am, so we can start flying at the airport at 04:00am --Kabul International is a busy airport with around 250 flights on a quiet day and up to 350 flights when it gets busy. Ker-rikey!

We work a long day on the airfield, finishing work, dusty, dry, sweaty and exhausted around 6:30pm, quickly shower and head back to Zadar with the aircrew for a couple of well deserved beers and some more delicious food. Another great night.

When we travel around Kabul we use a company, recommended by Mike: Afghan Logistics (website http://www.afghanlogisticstours.com/) . They provide many services, but their taxi service is great - English speaking drivers and call centre. You book via cell phone and they call as they arrive (Kabul isn't a good place for foreigners to loiter on the streets). They aren't too expensive around US$15- per trip but are a much better way of getting around than the standard Afghan yellow taxi. Apparently plenty of people who have got into these yellow taxis have just disappeared. Important safety tip noted. The culprits? Taliban and their supporters or criminal gangs.

Take care out there,
Cheers,
Dale/BoriS

Here we are, flying the friendly skies again; We flew out of Fujairah at 05:30am , a bit rough because for some reason we still had to get up at 02:45am to get to the airport to wait to leave.

We are in another Antonov - and AN-26 this time. It is the shape as the others we have used but is a cargo model. That means it has no seats (apart from 2 installed especially for Richard and I - no seatbelts though!) and it also has big doors that open up below the tail to load pallets of cargo with a forklift. Actually we have 2 big fibreglass water tanks, a half pallet of orange Fanta and among other things mail for some of the defence forces serving in Afghanistan. There isn't too much spare room in the back for us. We christen the aircraft "Anna" - we are struggling to come up with Russian women's names after Gertrudeski and Olga, our last 2 Antonovs.

We flew out over the Gulf of Oman, over Pakistan/Iran and into Afghanistan. What a spectacular landscape(s)! It ranges from dunes and soft sand to gravel plains and dust to jagged mountain ranges to wide mountain plains and plateaus (or is that plateaux?)

It is spring in Afghanistan right now, which means that snow is largely melted, the weather is warmer (temps ranging from mid twenties at night to mid thirties -degreesC- during the day - just nice.), there is a touch of a green tinge to large parts of the plains and water flowing in the rivers and streams. Quite pretty at times.

The sheer ruggedness and isolation of these mountains is made even more extreme seeing tiny villages, some with 6 or 8 houses clustered in tiny sheltered valleys. All in an ongoing panorama of dry, jagged, rocky mountain ranges. These people are obviously tough!

We land in Tarin Kowt first of all, to drop off the cargo. We have a roller coaster, tactical approach and landing: low, fast with lots of turns and bumps, followed by an impossibly tight turn in and a firm but exhilarating landing. I mentally do a "high-fives-all-round" to celebrate surviving another wild landing. Some Aussies soldiers turn up and make short work of unloading Anna. The airport is my first view of Afghanistan from the ground. Dusty, dry, Spartan and khaki sum it up pretty well. There is plenty happening - troops -local and foreign- racing around in trucks, four wheel drives and even one on quad bike. Everybody is armed.

Serious stuff - this is the south of Afghanistan, rather dangerous and still plenty of fighting going on in this area. I have had a bit of advice from a mate who has been here recently who warned me to keep my eyes open for trouble. It makes me a little nervous about what we have got ourselves into. I send a few texts to let a few people know that safe so far. It is cool though being somewhere like this, off on another adventure. God knows what Kabul is like, I have read blogs saying that Kabul is safe and there is no danger, as well as the exact opposite. I'm excited to find out either way.

We have a tactical take-off, again, low, fast - the wheels are up just after we get off the ground, to go faster, I guess- and we're over the airport perimeter, turning, turning, turning. YEEEEEHAAAAAA!! It's not nice knowing that this is to avoid ground fire of SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles). That said, roller coasters have nothing compared to take-off's and landings like this. They are scary but safe.

The next stop is Kandahar to refuel before the last leg to Kabul. Same tactical landing as before. YEEEEHAAAAA! again Kandahar airport doesn't look like much fun; very heavily fortified, barbed wire and earth filled walls are the order of the day. We don;t stay too long - enough time for photos and the fuel then off for another one of those take-offs. Woo-Hoo!

Kabul is another hour and a half from Kandahar and the landscape is less mountainous and more vast flat plains, surrounded by mountains. There are quite a few larger villages and town and a pretty patchwork of fields looking like dusty camouflage patterns. The landing is a normal approach, a sign that things are much quieter here than in the south. Kabul city itself is a vast, sprawling patchwork of mud coloured buildings, surrounded by more mountains and covering a few hills and valleys. It looks ancient. I mean it looks modern-ish, but its big enough and laid out like an old city. Most of the buildings are single storey walled houses with courtyards, build in blocks with a few larger multi-storey apartment buildings.

It's great to get out of the plane and breath some nice warm, dry air again. The air has a dusty feel to it-we later find out that the amount of dust here is so high that after a few days everyone, even locals, have "Kabul cough". It starts out with coughing, running nose and eyes and progresses to infected nasal passages for a few days and then settles down to a persistent little cough. The dust is so fine, you can't feel it until a reasonable amount has settled on something, but it gets in everywhere. We are told that apparently 0.35% of the dust is "of human origin" -meaning poo.

Yuck.

I can feel the dust building up in my nose, drying and stuffing it up. Good one.

After a few meetings and meeting the local officials and engineers we catch a taxi to our hotel. The Park Palace hotel.

I'll tell you about the Pak Palace Hotel next time,

Cheers,
Dale/BoriS

Blazing sun beating on my exposed neck, the draining humidity adding to the slowing down of time. I'm just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other at this stage. We stop for a quick sit-down in the shade, enjoying the slight cooling effect of the light breeze hitting my sweat soaked shirt. A gulp of warm water from the bottle and up and stumble dizzily the last 400m back to the hotel.

It's day one, I'm in Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. Richard and I arrived at 3:00am after over 24 hours flying and stopovers to get to Dubai. We brought a new phone (I forgot mine) and grabbed our rental car and essential coffee, finally arriving here after a couple of missed turns at 6:30am.

e are here to pick up our aircraft to carry out some flight inspection work in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan and then in Suleimaniyah in Northern Iraq.

fter a quick snooze and a check of our emails, we hit the streets of Fujairah to get a bit of a feel for the place - it's a bit like a tiny Dubai. Very small and relatively quiet. Nicer than Dubai for me and not too much traffic. Right now, the temperature is about 35 degreesC and humidity feels reasonably high-maybe 70%

We find ourselves in a small, 4 table, Sri Lankan restaurant (subtly named "Sri Lanka Restaurant") and we order a chicken curry and a beef curry. What we get is: Chicken and Beef curries, poppadoms, coconut chutney, okra, Sri Lankan vegetables, small eggplant, dhaal and another dish, made from "a plant that grows in the water" (it's slightly fibrous and a bit woody--maybe water chestnut?); either way--it is all fantastic! Everything has its own distinct flavour with varying levels of fire. We snarf as much as we can and venture back out into the midday sun and continue our explorations.

The Fujairah national museum is quite interesting. Archaeologists have uncovered artifacts here dating back to the 3rd millenium BC(The Bronze age). There is a lot of evidence that this part of the UAE has been populated for a long time and at some stages, fairly heavily too. There are a lot of ancient bronze arrow heads, adze heads, axe heads, rings, ancient glass bowls through to exhibits dating to the last couple of hundered years. I get the impression that there is a lot more archaelogical exploration and excavation to be done, but not much in the way of funding to do so.

Fujairah is one of the poorer emirates - they don't have oil and don't seem to be a major trading or financial centre or a travel hub. That said, Fujairah has plenty of environmental resources; Fujairah is located next to Oman on the Gulf of Oman, it is surrounded by rugged mountains (yes Phil, they got me thinking about how cool climbing is, again) and is relatively laid back. Apparently a lot of expats come to Fujairah from Dubai to go camping in the desert and mountains here. Diving is also a major sport here. I did notice in one of the brochures that there is a bull fighting stadium, for watching "head butting" - bulls fighting bulls, not people fighting bulls.

Next stop on our stroll: Fujairah Fort.
Fujairah fort is in the city, and looks just like something out of a movie! A real desert fort! We absolutely have to explore it. Unfortunately its undergoing rennovation (due to be finished in 2000, according to the sign) and we can't go in, so we have to settle for strolling around it, looking for any opportunity for sneaking in. The only option is scaling the wall in a corner, which could result in a nasty fall, so we're out of luck.

We decide to walk back via the corniche, a pleasant looking waterfront walk. Beautiful, blue green sea, no one around and the water is warm. Nothing like home-even at the best of times! Our "stroll" back to the the hotel starts feeling like a major effort; I'm just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other in the end. 4 Hours walking in the midday heat on day one makes for extreme acclimatisation. Lesson learned, we collapse in our room (we are sharing a 2 bedroom suite) gulp down some water, then a couple of beers, just to make sure.

Next stop Kabul.

Take care,
Dale/BoriS