by R. A. Lang
The super-heated water was able to keep the internal water temperature to just above freezing and we were able to apply pressure from time to time to search and seal any leaks along the one hundred metre line. We had the vent valve at the far end of our manifold open, with a flexible pipe fitted to it to take away the continuous water flow into our industrial drainage system. We had to maintain a flow of super-heated water continually for twenty-four hours a day to stop ice crystals forming. At pressure, the ice crystals would have taken just seconds to form, and in minutes explode the entire manifold.
Eventually, after my piping team had succeeded in closing all leaks on the manifold, they called me to witness the final pressure test and endorse its success. It was a freezing cold morning with snow and ice everywhere, and my piping team had worked continuously all through the night. I later discovered they’d worked for seventy-two hours with very little sleep out of respect for me, making final preparations for the pressure test. The test had to be completed so that my commissioning group could start earning their salaries.
Failure would have meant dozens of expats hanging around without anything to do until I had successfully completed the pressure and leak test of the manifold.
It was Christmas Day when we finally applied the full test pressure. I nervously walked along the pipe manifold, which ran along a five metre high pipe rack, expecting the worst, but it never came. My Iranian piping team had done an impossible job due to the ambient conditions at that time of year and had successfully achieved the impossible without antifreeze chemicals!
I gave the instruction to totally drain the manifold of all test water, including the opening of valve drain plugs and any other drain location where I could foresee water traps to avoid freezing ruptures. This took the rest of the morning to complete, before using nitrogen to dry the inside of the manifold.
Test completed, I stood at the beginning of the hydro-test, and heard the voice of an Italian process operator as he ran towards the chain link fence.
He spoke perfect English, but didn’t have too much hair left since I’d last met him at a party on our compound a few days before. He was distraught and totally beside himself. He explained that all the gauges in his control room had been fluttering around for days and he couldn’t find out where all their super-heated water was going.
I was standing on the hose that was still connected to his super-heated water supply and positioned my body so he couldn’t follow its connection to my test manifold. I assured him to have faith, and that I was sure, that by the time he had returned back to his control room his gauges would start reading correctly again.
My Japanese senior management were beside themselves once I had returned and announced the gas manifold had been successfully pressure tested, and they immediately arranged a celebratory party in true Japanese style. Needless to say, I supplied the illegal alcohol.
During one of my home leaves I had bought several Welsh flag ‘sew-on’ badges to give to my Iranian piping gang. My original intention was for them to sew them onto the breast pocket of their coveralls. Instead, they put them on their jeans and proudly walked around the streets of Esfahan and Mobarakeh displaying my countries flag for all to see.
I didn’t know at that time that apparently, the dragon on the Welsh flag originated from Persia. The Romans had copied it for one of their flags and the Welsh had taken a liking to it while the Romans were in Wales!
One of my Iranian piping guys lived on a farm. His father grew vegetables and fruit but was also a beekeeper and had over forty beehives. He came to the entrance of my office one morning and asked the security guards if they could call me to the door. Our guards didn’t speak any English but I had got very good at sign language and understood I needed to go to the office entrance.
The young Iranian presented me with a full comb of honey extracted from one of his father hives as a gift in return for the little Welsh flag sew-on!
I was quite overwhelmed by his generosity and accepted his gift, not knowing quite what to do with it? It was in a cardboard box and quite heavy. It felt like it was about five kilos in weight and it was held together with a wooden frame. I showed a French Canadian electronics engineer who was working with me and he explained what I needed to do with it. As the daytime temperature got to fifty degrees centigrade in the shade, I was told to hang it outside the back of my bungalow in direct sunlight with a bucket strategically placed underneath it.
This I did the next morning, as there was a clothes line stretching across my back yard. The following afternoon, when I arrived home I went straight out to my back yard to see what condition my honeycomb was in. All the honey had been melted by the intense sunshine and had dripped into the bucket. It had also made an excellent flytrap as the entire surface was covered with sticky flies, which I’m sure were busy doing what flies do in it!
As the heart-warming gentleman which I tried so hard to be, I held back the flies as I poured the full contents into plastic containers and gave it all to my Japanese colleagues. The French Canadian had already reserved the comb itself for his family. The honey was very nice, the one time I dipped my index finger into the clean part of it just to try it.
One Iranian working on the site brought me in a large family-sized coffee jar full of marijuana seeds. Just for fun, I dug the three flower borders in the back yard of my camp bungalow and scattered the entire jar over the soil. I watered them, but I didn’t think anything would become of them. In just a couple of days, however, I had a green back yard. After a couple of months, I had a jungle.
A few months later, a Canadian commissioning engineer joined us. We got on very well from the day he arrived. In no time, he said he could do with something to smoke. He mentioned that he’d heard there was good quality hashish in Iran. I told him what I had in my backyard, which he found hard to believe. That evening, he came to my place to see for himself.
Apart from being totally amazed by the size of my jungle, he noticed that my male and female plants were all together. He immediately removed all the male plants and piled them up separately. He explained that removing them would make the female plants produce more resin.
Despite my success, I decided to get rid of the whole lot. After all, it was only meant to be a bit of fun. The Canadian took several bags back to his place because he kept rabbits and rabbits love the leaves (as did his mad, local, feral cat). Later, we pulled the rest up and dumped them into a big pile for drying and eventual burning.
The following weekend, after a few smuggled whiskies, we thought it was a good time to burn the lot. It was so dry that it burnt immediately, and because we couldn’t avoid the smoke … wow. Enough said.
In addition to my brewing, distilling, and fermenting activities, I made several black market friends who could supply whisky at fairly reasonable prices. The Japanese expats also bought whisky, but they made the mistake by using the local currency – therefore paying ridiculous prices for the very same stuff.
I knew the black market needed good, old American greenbacks because that was what they used to buy foreign goods. In other words, Iranian Riyals were useless outside the country.
I could buy a bottle of black market whisky for just thirty dollars in those days. That was quite cheap compared to what the Japanese paid which was the equivalent of ninety dollars in local currency.
One night, the Japanese expats were having a party and didn’t have enough whisky to go around. One of them suggested that they knock on my door to see whether ‘Lang-san’ could save their party with a few bottles.
When I let them in, they looked a little shy as they explained that they were looking for some more whisky for their party, which I hadn’t been invited to.
I asked them how many bottles they needed, and they answered, “As many as possible.” They were probably thinking that I had one or two bottles available.
I took them to the spare bedroom, which I used for storage so they could choose which make of whisky they preferred. They nearly
collapsed when they saw 366 bottles neatly placed on the floor according to its manufacturer.
It wasn’t possible to order or request a particular brand in Iran; you just had to accept whatever was available at the time.
The Japanese wanted five bottles to start with. I quoted them fifty dollars per bottle, which they found very reasonable. They tried to pay in local currency, but I insisted on dollars. So off they went and returned minutes later with two hundred and fifty bucks.
The twenty dollar per bottle profit helped compensate for all the British scroungers who regularly visited my place. My guests dropped by most nights for a free drink, every time promising that they would see me all right on their next trip, when they had money.
Of course, I never saw any money from any Brit sponging off me, so it was just as well they were drinking my profits. I would have made a healthy profit if it weren’t for the British consuming my alcohol almost every night.
The Dutch, Italians, Canadians, and French all paid their way, but not a single time did any of the British pay me anything other than compliments to encourage the free flow of alcohol.
I left Iran in February of 1993, and I met my first wife just a week later. I’d just bought a new soft-top Vauxhall Astra, which was probably what caught her attention. She asked around until someone gave her my number, which she used to call me the very first thing the next day. I was vulnerable after being alone for over two years in Iran, so I was an easy target.
I won’t go into the details about her, but I’ll say that the valves in her heart would have complied with the engineering requirements for cryogenic service. Her heart would have had no problem passing the toughness tests, either, even at temperatures as low as minus 150 degrees centigrade (engineering talk).
Just a week after meeting her, she joined me on a quick week’s holiday to Tunisia. I was quite surprised that she was so readily willing to fly off with such a new acquaintance. Considering the location and local customs, she chose to wear skin-tight cycle pants, which drew a lot of attention from the locals. Wherever we went, the youngsters would grab at her backside and run off.
We visited the usual tourist spots and went on a few excursions including one down south for a camel safari in the Sahara desert. I was given a really ugly animal, which was muzzled to prevent it from biting the other, smaller camels. Considering we went as a couple, the Tunisian safari guides led our camels in different directions so the trip was a somewhat boring one. I’d grown to hate camels since sampling their meat on a number of occasions during my stay in Iran when it was sold as beef.
Other trips included visiting the underground homes, which had been carved out of the sandstone where parts of the Star Wars movie were filmed. The best trips were evening trips, barbeques, belly dancing, horsemanship etc. The week went fast and it was soon time to return back to Swansea and start concentrating on securing another contract.
After no time at all, I was contracted to do another nuclear power station shutdown, this time in Somerset, southwest England. I enjoyed working and staying in Somerset, but it wasn’t without its surprises. I chose to stay at a very old hotel, the same hotel as the project manager. This hotel had hundreds of years of history, some of which still possessed the premises.
The first night I thought I was hearing chains being dragged around my bedroom between the door and the window, but chose to ignore it and went back to sleep. The second night was no different from the first, nor the third night. I spoke to the hotel owner and he just smiled back at me and offered to relocate me to another room, which I readily accepted.
I knew noises were a normal part of such an old building, but in my second room the noises had a distinct pattern to them. Every one of the aged floorboards would squeak when I walked over it, each with its own personality. I quickly got accustomed to each floorboard and its location around my bed from the door over to the window. On my third night in my new room I was busy chatting on the phone to my new girlfriend, when I realised that the floorboards were creaking and squeaking in the very same manner and sequence as they did when I paced around the room.
It was clear that something was pacing back and fore from the door to the window continually. I explained what was going on whilst on the phone, which my girlfriend found highly amusing, and she accused me of not sleeping alone. This continued for the following week until I requested for yet another room change. None of this was new for the hotel owner so it was clear he’d heard it many times before from his previous guests who’d had the same experiences.
I explained that I really needed a room which hadn’t inherited anything from the past, as I really needed to get some restful sleep. The daytime work was very fast paced and quite exhausting and living in hotels and out of a small suitcase wasn’t the nicest lifestyle. Luckily for me, he did have another room which I could use, but it meant sleeping up in the roof of a converted barn. It was the same building in which my project manager was staying, so I agreed as I hadn’t heard any complaints about that place.
The building shouldn’t really have been converted into two floors and my room was located in the roof. The roof beams were so low in places that I really had to crouch down to save walking into the heavy trusses. The bed had also been squeezed under the roof so I had to enter it crouching down and sitting up in bed was impossible. Fortunately it was still summer so the draft coming through the old slated roof helped to ventilate the little room, even though it was quite fresh in the mornings.
I was to continue the following four months of my contract sleeping in the barn, which went without any more disturbances, and I must say the food in the hotel restaurant was no less than excellent. As a break, we would all go home every two weeks for a long weekend and sometimes I would drive home just for one night and leave very early in the morning for the 8am start back at the power station.
We completed the project with only a few days to spare so I moved in with my girlfriend in Swansea while waiting for my next opportunity, which I hoped would be overseas again. It wasn’t long before I was awarded a new contract, but this time to work in Saudi Arabia so the only way my girlfriend could join me there was for us to get married. We rushed around planning everything and got married in September of 1993.
Chapter 5
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
In October of 1993, I went to Saudi Arabia. I was required, by contract, to work for a three-month probationary period, so my wife had to join me later. Things were fine until then. After a thorough baggage search in Riyadh Airport (where they looked for anything that they might find offensive, such as a Bible), I was allowed to enter.
I was originally based in a hotel on Olaya Street, which ran through the heart of the city. I wasn’t to know at the time that I would only be based in Riyadh for the first eighteen months before I’d be transferred to Jeddah for another eighteen months. Staying in the hotel was not so pleasant but at least I didn’t need an alarm clock, as a nearby mosque would wake me up every morning at 4.30am, in time to travel at 5am for a 6am start out in the desert.
I remained in the hotel for six weeks until one day my Saudi company arranged for me, together with two other expats, to view a newly renovated compound at the other end of Olaya Street. The compound was quite well positioned, or so I thought at the time, as there was a huge supermarket just a hundred metres away and a few restaurants nearby.
We each picked one of the identical villas, which were all built around a central swimming pool. Two other families were already living there, a British couple and an Indian family, both of whom worked for the same company as I did, but were Riyadh based. The villas were enormous and quite ridiculous for just a couple to live in.
They each had five bedrooms and six bathrooms, a very large living room and lounge on the ground floor and another lounge on the first floor and a kitchen facing the pool. If first impressions were meant to impress, then they’d certainly succeeded in doing just that.
We needed to wait until our company had del
ivered all bedding, kitchen utensils etc. before moving in, which was to be the following week. We finally moved in a week later and it was quite a lot of work unpacking all the new appliances, bedding etc., which took most of the day, but finally things began to take shape. A week later, we were to go to our head office in Riyadh to collect our keys for the cars that had been allocated to each of us.
We were ushered out to the office car park and shown our not so new cars. It was difficult to tell what colour they were as they’d been sitting in the desert car park for the best part of a year. We all had a Toyota Cressida which was the very same as all the Riyadh taxis. They were noted for their reliability, which was the main importance, as if one happened to break down out in the desert it could quickly become a life-threatening event miles from nowhere.
Once we had used the bottles of mineral water, which we were made to carry to make a clearing on the windscreens to look through, we were allowed to proceed into the Riyadh rush hour traffic. It was the first time I’d driven both a left hand drive car and also on the other side of the road so it was a nerve-racking experience for the first few days.
Riyadh also had an American road system, which was also something new to me that took a lot of getting used to for a Brit. To turn left on the highway, it first meant taking a right hand slip road off the highway before being able to use the overpass to turn left. The secret was to cut across all four lanes of high speed traffic without incident. Any form of accident in Saudi Arabia was automatically your own fault. The logic behind that was the simple fact that if you weren’t in the country, nobody would have hit you.