From South Wales to Al Jiddah

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This is John Morgan's Adult exploits. He has contribruted many short stories about his childhood days in Manchester. You can find these on the Memory lane page

Read John's adult Exploits, From South Wales to Al Jiddah

From South Wales to Al Jiddah, that's a jouney of some magnitude, especially for someone whose greatest venture there to was from Birkenhead to Milan and back on a motor bike.

I moved from Birkenhead to pontypool in the spring of 1974. I had been self employed in the building industry for some time but due to the avowed intentions of the Tory party Merseyside was to become a test bed for the philosophy of destroying the trade unions. Mr Heath made it quite clear that after the period of time that the unions, especially those based on Merseyside and in the shipping trades, ie shipbuilding and docking, the eradication of trades unionism was to be foremost in their minds.

This brought about the 'three day week', and all that went with it. I shopped around to see what options I had.

In June 1973 the Tory goverment decided to scrap the refurbishment grant scheme that so many had looked to enable them to upgrade homes. This cessation of the scheme had immediate effect on the many small but legitmate building companies that had been struggling against the cowboy firms that had come into being to service the needs of grant aided homeowners.

Our greatest competitors were not other builders, or entrepenurial plumbers and joiners setting up for themselves, no, it was milkmen with spare afternoons and shiftworkers using off shift time in order to encroach onto our skilled territory that made the going tough for us. The advent of standardisation of materials that had helped the builder since the war, now became an enemy, as it seemed anyone who could use a saw, blowtorch or read a drawing could set himself up as a 'builder'. This in turn has lead to the government stepping in to protect the consumer with such regulations that exist under the CORGI scheme. It was the shoddy work being done by unskilled and untrained personnel that gave rise to the term 'cowboy builder, and that caused many well established small builders to fall foul of the loss of work that these upstarts caused.
Anyway, I was amongst the fallen, so as I began to say, I shopped around to see if I could devine an area that may offer me better prospects. I already had connections with south Wales, I have a lot of relations in the region, so I decided that as the M4 corridor was rapidly expanding towards Newport, this may be the right location for the future.

I sold up in Birkenhead, but the prices of houses down here were curiously much higher at that time than they were in Birkenhead. I managed to find a place that would leave me about £500 short of an outright purchase. I managed to get a short term mortgage of the local council, and as soon as the paperwork was done and dusted I moved my family and I to Pontypool. What little collateral I had remaining I spent on doing work on this 'new' property. After about six months or so, I decided to put my carpentry to use once again and so went to work for a local firm. Some two years whilst sitting eating my lunch one day, I was reading the Mirror, when I saw an advert for technical personnel to take up contracts in Saudi Arabia. I mulled it over for a while then thought to myself, 'OK! they may need electronics technicians and telephone engineers and such like, but surely they would also need people to service the housing needs etc for these same people.'

A couple of days later I rang up the number in London that had advertised, and was invited for an interview. They told me I would have to sit a trade test. No problem I stated, after all I was a skilled apprenticed trained carpenter/joiner. The test took place in a small room that was little more tha a large packing crate that had been converted into an office. I had two questions thrown at me, the first asked me what size timbers would be appropriate to carry a floor of approximately 12ft by 12ft. I answered, depending on the loading, for domestic use about 7inch by 2inch. For industrial storage .10 inch by 2,5 inch. Next question, If you are going to install an electric ring main in this room what size cable would you use, answer 2.5mm twin and earth.

Right then! That shows you are sufficiently skilled and knowledgable for the job, you will be notified when to start etc.
About a week later I was on receipt of a letter telling me to present myself at the Airport Hotel, at Heathrow on the evening of 22 August 1977. The next day I would be on a plane to the desert kingdom.

We landed in Jeddah at approximately 12 midnight, but, by the time we had got through the airport security, more about that later, and customs, more about that later also, it was gone 1.30am The heat was horrendous, and made more so because of the immense level of humidity. Our shirts were stuck to our bodies as though we had showered fully clothed.
We were collected by established employees and driven in, thankfully, air conditioned vehicles to our temporary accommodation.
More to follow

John 16/12/2003

More from Jedda! The 23 August 1977. I awoke about 9-30 to the sounds of banging on the door of the apartment I had been esconced in overnight. It was a Thursday and I'd like you to keep in mind that in Saudi Arabia, Thursday equals Saturday in the UK, Friday is their Sunday. It's the old religious thing again I'm afraid.

This guy, Brian, had come to collect us all for our induction tour de force. After we had sampled the delights of the 'canteen', which was in fact two apartments back to back and knocked into one long unit, we all climbed into the same vehicle of the previous evening. I learned then that it was a general Motors 'Suburban' model, it held about 15 of us, and was similar in style to a large or longer wheel based range Rover.

The fisrt trip was down to the central souk area for a bit of a shufti, or look around. On the way down town, we had been sleeping in a compound of apartment buildings, which lay about 12 or so miles to the north of the city of Jedda, we came across the then unfamiliar 'road block'. This was amanned stop and possibly search point, where the police would be checking, as we found out later, for overstaying Hadji's (pilgrims) whom had been to Mecca to make Hadj, and had remained in country illegally.

The junction at which this police check took place was the crossroads of Medina Road, which we were on, and Palestine Street.

As we waited our turn to be checked through, to our right there was a large black saloon car, a Cadillac, all it's windows except the front windscreen were blacked out, I suppose to prevent people, especially men, looking in and ogling women passengers, anyway after a short while the driver of this saloon, a large arab began to sound his horn in a gesture of impatience. The young thin arab policeman who was checking the documents of the driver of a 1' rat' taxi, looked up at the disturbance and wagged hi finger from side to side as though to say 'naughty, naughty', and went back to inspecting the paperwork. Again the horn blasted out, again the 'hard stare and wagged finger of the policeman. The next time the horn sounded, the policeman placed the papers on the roof of the cab of the taxi ,and weeaving his way past a couple of waiting cars, went up to the front of the Cadillac, He gestured to the large, no, fat Arab, telling him to up the binnet or hood as they say in America.

Up went the hood, he reached inside and came back out again this time with a hand clutching a mess of wiring, then after slamming down the hood gave us a grin as wide as the Red Sea, and casually returned to finish what he had bee doing previously, There were 15 Brits absolutely screeching in laughter, as as we went through the checkpoint the skinny little cop gave us a cheery wave, winked and waved us on our way.

I'm afarid I lost the rest of that day except to note that on the side of the road there was a heap of motorcycles about five metres high. A series of wood boards were laid up the side of this heap, there must have been 200 or more bikes in the pile. When I asked later about this sight I was informed that they were bikes confiscated from kids as young as 12 yrs of age. usually beacuse they were riding the things dangerously or at excessive speed. The cops would stop them, tell them to return with daddy, of course daay never would turn up. He didn't want any truck with the law, and so the confiscation held. The pile of bikes were the result. And, they were not silly little scooters either, in the main they were great big Jap or American units, with the odd BMW amongst them. The kids could be as young as 12 beacuse at that time anyone over twelve was considered an adult.

More to come

John

16/12/2003

Yet more from the desert.

I mentioned the 1 rat taxi, well let me describe what a 'rat' was. The currency unit of Saudi Arabia is the Riyal, a european word that means the same as Real in Real madrid, or Royal as in The Queen etc.
As Saudi Arabia is a kingdom I suppose that the name is sort of appropriate.

Not to be thwarted in denigrating anything exotic Brits tend to alter things ina derogatory manner as usual, so the Riyal became the 'rat'. The 1 rat taxi was thus. It was usually , almost always a small pick-up truck, either Toyota , Mazda, or Nissan/Datsun with a small railing panel on either side of the back. Inside the back would be a plank seat running from the back of the cab to the tail gate, The tail gate would be removed and a step welded to the back bunper for people to get up into the back. You gave the driver 1 Riyal (rat) and you could go whever he drove to, getting off when near to where you wanted to get to. Usually the Souk (market). This was a real Alladins cave of a place, you could obtain vitually anything from anywhere in the world except, pork products, or items of a sexual nature, pornographic mags etc for example. The chemist shops were relatively useful in that they held a great store of medications, antibiotics and so on, and usually you could get whatever you wanted without prescription in those days. Later on they put a curb on such liberal dispensation, and the trade became more like the Uk in that certain stuff was only available through a doctors presciption. On eplace I worked a couple of years later, they actually arrested a guy on a building site for dishing out a couple of asprins to a chap with a headache. When they went for it they certainly pulled no punches.

Now for the driving licence. We were instructed to apply for aaudi licence, although they would not 'do'you for not having one, a Brit one was acceptable, a lot of the cops were lower escelon Arab types who had no English capability, sure they could read arabic, abd so if you were stopped and only had a Brit licence, the length of time it took to get the situation sorted out was not worth not getting the Saudi version. It meant getting a pasport type photo, and atking it to a certain police station, there you filled out a form, then waited for the test. I waited about two weeks before my appointed test date. I duly turned up at the correct police station at the appointed hour, 9 am. The seargeant took me out into the yard, ointed out a police vehicle and asked, 'What colour mister?' 'Blue', I replied. He turned back to the desk and said something in arabic, turned to me shook my hand and said 'Mubarrak Sidiqu'

Another copper standing by in a captains uniform smiled and translated for me, 'He said, congratulations, you,ve passed, please wait here your licence will be issued in a few minutes' And it was.
I had to take a second test on my next contract, as my first one had run out, this consisted of presenting myself at the police station. Sitting down and drinking lovely sweet mint tea, having a few words converstaion, then being shown the door with a hand to my elbow as the other hand handed me my licence, a handshake once more and I was legal all over again. Magic!

The first day at work, that is the 25th August 1977 we were taken in the same Suburban vehicle down to the company offices. On the way we passed a pick up truck that had shot over a mound of earth, and crashed down into a deep excavation on the side of the Medina Road. They were installing storm drains I believe, anyway the driver must have had his foot where they normally had it, on the floor, or pedal to the metal as the Yanks used to say. There was no street lights in those days, the poor dead sod was half hanging out of the truck through what was once the windscreen. He must have been there all night we guessed. We tried to get the driver to stop to see if we could help, but he refused, saying 'No No mister, if we help we will become responsible to his family.' The last one to touch the victim apparently had to take responsibility for his situation. This could mean taking on a wife and x number of kids. At least until it was all sorted out with the police and so on. This would involve one in a terrible amount of problems with the employer, so we had strict instructions not to get involved under any circumstances.
Days went into weeks and weeks into months, the job I had supposedly been recruited for did not exist, I found out much later that I should have been over there three months previously than the August, as I was actually emplyed on a different programme. I went into the ATC (air traffic control) programme, in fact I should have been on the GEP(ground environment programme). There were differences in the terms of employment that did not come to light until I discovered the true situation. But thats another story.

More laterJohn

16/12/2003

A SWAPPED SITUATION.

As I said before, the job I was supposed to go to did not exist, at least it did exist, but for reasons to be explained, it went to somebody else. For the first few weeks all I and others did was sit around the offices doing nothing, we read all the books that were there, the same with the magazines talked slept in armchairs and couches and got extremely bored with it all.
One morning I was trying to read a book for the second time when the door half opened and a head with dark curly hair on it came round the edge of it. He saw me at the same time I saw him, and instant recognition took place, It was a chap called Brian Jones from Wirral in Cheshire. We both exclaimed Hiya! and set too discussing our previous encounter. The last time we had met was working in Cammel Lairds shipyard on the liner Windsor Castle in the 1959/60 period of it's construction.
We became good mates again, and ended up sharing an apartment together with another lad from down the south coast. As he used to say when asked, The centre of the universe, 'Wivenhoe'
After some time of being totally bored, I got friendly with a scouser called Frank Skelly, he was a civil engineer and was in charge of operations at Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and the place where I had supposed to be sited, again, more on that later.
After I expressed the thought that I may resign out of sheer boredom at the end of my 90 days induction period, he suggested that as they were a site clerk short on the main construction site in Jedda, would I be ok if he put me in for the post. 'Go ahead' I said It was not a job I couldn't handle
so I became a clerk of works at the headquarters site of the Royal Saudi Airforce that was being constructed by an American Swedish joint venture by a conglomerate named Grove-Skanska.

I was set up in an office that was made from a converted steel shipping container. I had access to the whole site and in reality, domain over all the operations on site which was effectivly giving me authority to sign off completed sections of work as and when they were completed, all this on a $40million project. The site consisted of three large buildings, an educational unit, a maintenance and logistics (stores) unit and an administration and engineering block.
In overall charge was the site engineer an American guy named Lowell Gresham. Low was a great pal, and I had dinner at his apartmet quite a few time, his wife was charming. Unfortunately after a few weeks he was relocated to the company HQ in Ontario California. so I didn't meet him again. The next Head guy was a Brit of some years named Ted Button, he was of the old school, friendly and without a sharp edge anywhere. He was seperated, maybe divorced from his wife, who was an African princess of some sort, his daughter was in a public school in the UK, Roedean or somewhere similar.. After a while he too went away to another site Then came the best guy of all, Bob Burgess, a civil engineer who had come to the discipline via the Westinghouse railway engineering company. In fact he started out as the American of a footplateman, rising through the driving ranks until he became a mainliner driving those great big trains across The United States. Full of stories and a phenonemal memory for the life he had led. Last of all came a brash New Yorker, Ed Santo, I believe he had the stage in his blood, but he was rather too much of a Yank for my taste, and so I had to bear him for the last few weeks as a clerk of works.
By then the job was coming to closure and it seemed was over budget, Ed Santo it appeared was a chopper man for the company, he certainly acted that way. I didn't dislike him, he was easy enough to get on with on a personal basis, but jobwise he was very, very hard work.
One of the guys working for Grove Skanska was called Charlie Jarbo, he was a great character, but I had little to do with him off site as he lived across the other side of Jedda, but one day I noticed he had a terrible gash running across the left side of his torso, it ran under the rib cage from his belly button to his spine, I asked him about it casually, so as not to cause offence, some people don't like questions about their appearance, 'Oh! that' he said , brushing it off like it was nothing at all, I got that crashing a plane. He came from some way out place in Texas or Arizona and the whole family apparently treated travel by air as normal as most of us do car travel. Well what can one expect when they sort of popped out for a burger and travelled maybe as much as 3 or 400 miles.

The site agent was a big raw boned guy who was actually 84 years of age, and big enough and hard enough to lay out men of half his age. very taciturn in manner, but a real gent once you managed to open him up.

The overall boss was a scrawny little arab chap called Mohammed Dabbagh( pron'd dabar). I had been warned to watch out for him as he was a real firebrand. One morning, no actually it was lunchtime, I had hust come back from the nearby Somali village (more about that later) and was enjoying my spit roast chicken and bread, when the door of my office opened and in walked this little arab guy. he was dressed in an American baseball suit, and had a catchers mitt on one hand and stood in front of me slamming a baseball into the mitt.
'Hello' I said, 'can I help you.'?. but I first preceeded to say 'sallamahlekhum siddiq', which is basically hello friend.
He replied 'who the hell are you?,
'I'm the clerk off works' I replied.
'Oh! right' he said, then asked my name.
'Morgan'
'Right Morgan' he said, 'I'm, Mo Dabagh'
'Pleased to meet you' I said, and stuck out my hand. We shook hands and he told me to call him Mo from then on.

After a while he used to call on me to do little favours for him, such as one time I had to drive him to Mecca on business. I was not allowed into Mecca itself, so he took a taxi from the checkpoint and told me to pick him up at five pm.
This I duly did, and on the way back to Mecca, a journey of some fifty miles or so, he had me drive his car, a Mercedes 500sel at 140 mph and still he wanted more speed, but we soon ran out of roads capable of holding such velocity. As we approached Jedda we had to slow to allow for other cars and lorries on the road.

More later

17/12/2003

Another episode from my adventures in Saudi Arabia.

The Arab boss, Mr Mo Dabagh, had me drop him outside the Arab National bank in Jedda, he took a plastic shopping bag off the back seat and went into the bank.
I knew what was in the bag, because whilst waiting for his return to the car at the checkpoint outside Mecca, thinking there may be something to eat in the bag, I had a look in it. All the 'cabbage, it contained was in the form of dollars and Riyals. There was, I found out later over £100 grand in the bag. That, at the then salary I was on amounted to about ten years pay.
He then asked me to return him to his accomodation, which was a American type mobile home thing, he was having a new house built elsewhere. After we were inside he proceded to offer me some food and a drink. I was fully expecting sweet mint tea. What I was then offered was a cabinet full of the best in imported booze. He had the lot. Whiskey, gin, brandy a variety of other spirits and lots of different wines. His large American fridge was also full of beer also. I had to drive that tank of a car back to the office later so was exceptionally circumspect in my liquid intake, but he promised me some stuff to take home with me at a later date, Whiskey, Johhny Walker Red Label was fetching about £90 a bottle in them days, todays worth about £120 per bottle, so you can see where my interest lay, why drink money I thought. When I did get some bottles off him, I simply sold them at the going rate. If I remember correctly I managed to get about £650 for the ones I sold.
As the construction went ahead it became clear that the 'city power', that is the mains electricty was not going to get onto the site for some months after the place was ready for it.
I heard that there was talk of them hiring a generator to do the job temporarily. Frank Skelly in the meanwhile had gone off on vacation to Canada, he had relatives there. Whilst he was away an investigation began into why a enormous amount of furniture imported from Sweden and imtended for all the apartments, had been spirited away from the storage facility. It came to light that a manager from the support services, along with others, including, I was informed, Frank, was responsible. Anyway the police became involved and they arrested most of the 'gang' and taking their passports allowed them out on bail whilst the investigation proceeded. Now this support services manager, a large Brit, had a reputation for being a very heavy drinker. He had made friends with a Yank over the months past, and on a monthly basis, this Yank would visit the commissery at the American embassy to collect his 'rations'. The Yanks had it well sewn up, they were allowed to have booze, and bacon and pork, even porno magazines it seems, at the embassy . Well the Yanks, especially the so called 'vets' that is ex-military personnel were given a certain amount of leeway with regard these sort of supplies, and they did take advantage of such a concession. The guy in question, Bill by name, used to invite this support services manager over on the evening of his 'rations' being to hand for a meal and a booze up.
In the compound which went under the name of it's owner, Al Khareji, we had just completed a brand new swimming pool, although it had not yet been officailly opened, we were using it with the company's permission. At the time I was manager of the works club which was located on the ground floor of one of the three floored apartment buildings. A part time occupation, but for which I received a small salary of about 500SR per month, cash paid out of the club funds.
Above the club lived another Brit, Arthur his name, surname I have forgotten, anyway he came running into the club at about ten thirty one night, just before we were about to close.
'There's someone face down in the pool' he shouted. The pool was right across the street from the pool.
Naturally we ran out to see what he was on about, sure enough there was a body limply hanging face down on the surface of the bright blue pool. We realised at once who it was, the large Brit manager from support services. I don't swim, but Brian Jones, who had run across with me, was like a dolphin in water, he plunged straight into the pool and got under the man's body, I had grabbed a long aluminium pole that was used by the pool cleaner, and reaching it out across to Brain, pulled for all I was worth to get the body and Brian to the poolside.We struggled with the weight of the man, but as I heaved and pulled I realised that he was beyond help, I could see his neck was broken, His head flopped around in a totally unnatural manner.
I had three new bottles of scotch in my room, I think Brian had something also, so before we did anything else we sent for the general manager of the programmme and then scooted off to dispose of the incriminating stuff up in our apartment.
I was not about to lose £270 pounds worth of loot, so I hid it up on the roof in a water tank. All the roofs had these.

I think Brian poured his away in the kitchen sink or the w.c. pan.
The following morning we had to present ourselves at the main police station in the city centre to make a statement. This consisted of one line of very small writing ina tattered old excercise book. Have you ever tried to condense such an incident into one line? It was extremely difficult I must say.
Back to where I left off about the generator,
Prior to his departure for Canada, Frank had told me all about the requirements for the generator, but had not given me any actual figures in regard to the amount of power that would be called for. Doing very little at this stage of the works, I sat in the office poring over the electrical blueprints anf worked out the fact and figure for myself. At this point in time I was virtually totally in charge, so decided to sort things out for the job myself.
First of all I went over across to Mecca called into see the manager of Zahid Tractors, there was another Brit, we got on quite well from the word go, anyway, I told him what I was looking for and he gave me the requirements for siting the monsterous unit. It was to be a Caterpillar power unit with assocaited brush gear to provide about half a mega watt of electricity. A concrete base would have to be provided and a diesel tank of appropriate capacity. He suggested a tank roughly equal to that on the back of a petrol truck, say about 17,000 litres.
I went away, having first agreeing to have the site ready for the next week.
My first port of call was to Charlie Jarbo to get access to on one hand his Digger, and then his plumbing equipment and materials. Once this was sorted out I went off site again to see about a tank and a crane to lift it into the hole that was being dug as I shopped about. Within two days I had everything ready.
The Caterpllar was delivered at the same time as the tank, so that the crane could be on hand for both tasks. This was also completed.
I had a chat with a Brit electrician who worked in the new M & L centre, for his advice on power requirements over cable sizes, and with the information provided. went downtown to the souk and purchased some thirty metres of 300mm MCM cable. The electrician connected up the generator the next dat, and I did all the pluming works, for the diesel pipes from tank to 'genny,. By the Wednesday afternoon it was not only all installed, but in fact up and running.
'I'd better go down to the office now '.I thought, to tell them the news.
I entered the office and found the team were all in the boardroom/ I went in and stood by the door until a break in the conversation would allow me to say my piece.
After a while, the manager of my dept. asked me what I had to say, so I told him,Actually as I enterd the room they were discussing the very job that was already done and running. I think that they were totally dumbfounded to find out that a carpenter from the UK could outdo all thse brilliant civil engineering types. There was no telephone capability in those days, the Swedish Ericcsonn company were still installing it all at the time, so they could only contact the site by actually going up to the site. They all turned out of the office and dragging me along behind in the siite vehicle all amde our way back up to the M & L centre.
Needless to say, I received little praise for my efforts, except from the manager of the M & L centre, another Brit Colin Reed, who had been desperate to haver his facility up and running as he had about thirty technicians in there twiddling their thumbs.
Like I said to Bud Barbeau the civils manager, 'You Yanks, we taught you all you know and you still know nowt'.
More to come,
John

18/12/2003

Would you like to read John's Stories of his Manchester childhood. He has many updates on This page

Now for a deviation fromthe construction works.

I had occasion to visit the area office of Grove Skanska, it was situated away from the site, and was in fact a villa in a residential part of north Jedda. There were some blueprints that had to be copied and some other documants that had to be signed off regarding completed end items (CEI's). As I approached the area where the office was located, I had the misfortune to get stuck behind a very slow moving and heavily loaded Hino truck. Hino is a far eastern make, I think part of the Hyundai conglomerate. As we slowly progressed along a narrow street with villas on either side, the truck suddenly came to a halt, then unbelievably the rear end, that is the part to which my vehicle was just a few metres behind, started to sink into the surface of the road. 'That's queer' I thought to myself. As it was loaded with about twenty tons of pea sized gravel, I noticed that some of the mounded up stuff was coming off the truck over the back tail gate into the road and rapidly spreading backwards towards my vehicle. I stuck the car into reverse and moved back a few metres, thinking it may be possible to go around the truck even though the road was very narrow.

The truck carried on with it's descent until the whole of it was by this time down in the ground with just the cab section sticking up into the air. I jumped out of my vehicle as the thought had struck me that there was a driver in the cab, and if the truck went into the hole any more he would be trapped. It would have been one heck of a job to extricate the truck should that have happened, and therefore his life was possibly in danger. I ran to the side of the truck to see the driver trying to squirm out of the window. I climbed up on the side of the cab, and grabbed a hold of his clothing and heaved. We both finished up in a heap in the road. As we picked ourselves up, and by this time he was all over me, shaking my hand and hugging me in turns, and jabbering away in a garbled manner, obviously thanking me for my help, there was a sudden groaning sound and the ground under the front of the cab section collapsed and down went the rest of the truck into the hole. Now we are faced with a new type of road surface, for about four or so metres loose gravel then a creamy white metal domed part.

I found out within minutes what the problem was that had caused the situation. By the time this event took place, most of this part of the city had been provided with a piped water supply. Previous to the installation, all the water had been delivered by tanker. The villas all had underground storage tanks that were filled by these water trucks on a regular top-up basis. Of course once the city water had arrived , the trucks no longer came. Most of these underground cisterns were within the walls of the villa garden, but the one in question had been dug in the street. Cars and other light traffic had managed not to break through the surface., but a great big truck loaded with, in excess of, twenty tons was a different matter completely.

Another incident took place down by the crossroads near to Palestine street. Many of our co workers had little jobs on the side, company jobs catually, but not part of their contracts. One such was driving the works bus. The guy doing the driving on one occasion, for which he was paid a small amount, had collected those using the bus, from the work area,and was travelling about the city dropping off people here and there. As he turned into a residential street that ran parallel with Medina road he came across a large puddle in the road. There had been heavy rain that morning, He ignored the puddle had he had done with others in his journey. Big mistake. Think about the UK it would have been a puddle, think about Jedda, it was not. Down went the front of the bus, into a hole ten feet wide and six feet deep.

Nothing in Saudi Arabia in those days was trustworthy.

Talking about holes in the road, I'll change course for the next bit of the saga.

In the evenings, one of my hobbies was taking the Suburban down to the souk to give some of the females a shopping trip. We had two classes of females attached to our situation, wives of those on accompanied status, and women who worked for the company, mainly as office workers. Nearly every night, someone, male or female would want to go to the souks. I say souks because there were more than one. The two most popular ones were the main souk, and the 'southern or electric souk. In the southern souk, it was great for buying all manner of electrical items, especially the larger 'white' goods such as fridges and freezers, cookers and so on. There were also some shops that offered other stuff that could be obtained in the main souk, but seemed to be rather cheaper most of the time.

In the main souk, they were in the process of laying drains, and for the purpose had dug a trench, (can that be classified as a hole in the road?) all the way from the gold souk right the way down to the place where the orange juice stand was, about two hundred metres or so. I had been accompanying a very large, but well propotioned American lady to the gold souk. She towered over me, I am only five foot four inches, she must have been at least six foot three or four. She was defying convention in that she was exposing her arms. In fact she was wearing very tight jeans and a very, vey tight pale green 'tee' shirt. If I say that her chest was somewhat prominent, I lie,
it was exceptionally prominent. I noticed a small Arab guy in tattered rags of cloth for clothing staring at this giantess as we walked down the side of the trench towards the orange juice stand. Let me tell you about this trench. It had been opened some time previous to to our present visit, and whereas prior to it being there, the shopkeepers had no doubt relieved themselves at th rear of their shops, latterly they had been using the trench, and it told you so through your nose. The bottom of the trench was covered in effluent invarious stages of putrefaction, and the sides were covered in a green mould that was very verdant to see.

As we moved along, stepping over various things that could not be described, and avoiding small craters and lumps of stone etc, this little tatty Arab suddenly darted across the trench and made a flying grab at the breasts of this large lady walking behind me. She let out a yelp followed by a mouthful of foul language, and some American women can really curse for the USA, then she hit him full on in the middle of his face with a fist the size of a very large Christmas pudding. He in turn flew backwards the way he had come, and landed in the muck and mire at the bottom of the trench, stunned. The smell rose to us and people were visibly nauseated by it. Not too far away stood a religious policeman carrying his ubiquitous small stick with which they tended to flick across the arms or legs of worshipers if they were slow off the mark in heading for the mosque at Salah (prayer time).Or anyone else they took umbrage at. He came over to us and at first all he could see was this enormous woman rubbing the knuckles on her fist. His eyes I noticed travelled the same route as those of the little guy lying in the slime at the bottom of the ditch. then he noticed her bare arms and went to raise his stick to hit her on the exposed skin. She devined his thoughts and raised her fist again, placing it within inches of the policemans nose. With that he beat a hasty retreat scooping up the muddy and very smelly Arab as he went. He dragged him off down the souk, no doubt to berate him somewhere else, so as not to be seen by us westerners no doubt.

At other times I quite often took people down to see the money changers. After we were paid, we had mostly arranged a split payment method, part into bank accounts at home, and part in local currency, people would want to spend some time on a buying trip if, due to go home on vacation may want to purchase presents, or, if at the end of their contract, would want to clear up any residual Riyals, the money changers were the best bet. They gave a better exchange rate than the banks, and in cash, where the banks preferred to only give cheques. On one of these trips I was taking a bunch of guys, some Brits and some Yanks down to the best money changer. I knew where all the best was in virtually any requirement, be it money, or gold, or just consumer goods, and this was one trip to the best in the field at the time. One of the Yanks, was a real nice guy, with whom I got on very well. He was from Georgia and had been a sherriff at one time. He was into country music and was quite a good performer, he both sang and played a mean guitar. Anyway he managed to suddenly get a gripping pain in his stomach and begged me to stop so he could relieve himself. Well that may be ok in the USA, or the UK, but in Jedda?, no way, there were no places to solve that sort of problem. I told him I would have to get him to a seclude back alley or something, and park up in such a way as to obscure him as he disposed of the problem. This I managed to do. He was then reluctant to move from the vehicle in case it happened again, and with what we called the Jedda trots, it most certainly would do so within a very few minutes. I took his money from him and the rest of us went over to the main part of the souk to get money exchanged. I left a couple of the guys there as they wanted to shop, and promised I would return to a certain spot to pick them up later.
The rest and I returned to the car, and for the twelve miles back home, the Georgian ex sherriff travelled with his face down on the front passenger seat as I drove that car back to Khareji compound. One of the others unbeknown to me, timed the return trip, it took just 12 minutes he said later. Two years later I had returned to Saudi Arabia, and met up with some guys at another compound and they knew all about that trip from the souk to Khareji that took only 12 minutes, it seems it was something of a legend by that time.
My one spot of fame I suppose.

More to come.

John

19/12/2003

Guns and No Guns, Maybe a medal!

Then came the time of the 'war' in Yemen.

It came about that there was a desperate situation developing in the neighbouring state of Yemen. The company were constructing certain works that would be part of the ATC air traffic system, and we had some personnel in Sa'ana the capital. At that time Sa'ana was well behind Jedda and other Saudi cities in that it was hardly out of the middle ages regarding the way things were. Young boys could be seen wandering about with AK 47's (Kalashnikov's) slung over their shoulder. Knives and pistols very evident about the person of the average Yemeni of the day. All in all, as tension built between the north and south, trigger fingers became evry itchy it seemed. To prevent any problems with our operations down there it became imperative that personnel be re-patriated to Saudi Arabia should war break out. The word went out amongst the work force for volunteers to take over a night watch at the M & L centre; the idea was to stand by on radio alert, the only contact we had with Sa'ana was with two way radio. Should we get the alert from Sa'ana that the worst had happened, the watchman was directed to notify the management, who in turn would despatch the company Lear jet to evacuate those in peril.
No one seemed interested in doing this vital task, so in stepped the hero yet again. I took on this task with a degree of trepidation as I had no love for the idea of sitting in a hardback chair all night waiting for some voice fronm the ether calling for help. But money took precedence over comfort.
As it happened there was a perfect solution to this matter of 'comfort'. On site we had a vehicle called a CONDOR. (more about this to come) This was a large type of mobile home built on to a truck chassis. It was fully fitted out in a most plush fashion, and had a cooker, a fridge and other attactions.
I persuaded the manager to let me have this Condor as my temporary residence for the duration.
This was agreed to and it was brought around, from where it had been parked, to the side of the M & L centre nearest to where I could arrange for an extension speaker to be installed. The main transceiver was located in the centre of the building, so a long twin cable was laid around walls and through doorways. This also had telephone cable with it to enable me to contact the appropriate manager should the need arise.
For five weeks nobody wanted to take over this duty, so it was left to me alone. I took a portable tv up to the Condor and fell asleep every night watching it.
My manager felt that as I had been good enough to volunteer, it was only fair he book me in for a days pay on top of the night duty. Another manager decided that I should be compensated somehow also. At the end of the month, I discoverd that my total hours for which I received pay was 168. AS there so only 168 hours in a full week of 24hours per day, I felt I did alright out of the session, especially as that all important panic call never came.
Condor.
The company, through the logistics department ordred ten of these vehicles. The outlying stations that were scattered all over the kingdom, had no on site accomodation for semi resident technicians to live in, so these Condors were going to be the answer to that problem. They had their own generating capacity should the main power, again generator derived, fail, So they were never going to be subjected to the raw desert conditions, or so it was hoped. They had plenty of water storage, drums of fuel, were air conditioned and all in all were quite home from home.
There was only one problem. They were machanically not very good. They were supposed to be suited to cross desert travel. That was the first drawback, as soon as they were driven across the nearby bit of desert, the front end, where the engine was situated, would rise at the slightest bump or ridge in the ground, then come crashing down with an horrendous smashing metallic crash onto the chassis. That was a major setback, as it was envisaged that these monsters had to travel in some cases a thousand miles to get to their designated site. The mechanics set to to rectify this, and stub shock blocks were welded to the chassis, this left little room for and down movement, so they finished up with little or no shock absobing capability. Our technicians were not amused.

To try to get around all these and other problems with the Condors, the logistics manager got in touch with the manufacturers in the USA, only to find they had been bankrupted some time past. He managed to contact the general foreman of the company, and requested that he travel to Saudi to help put things right. The guy probably knew absolutely nothing about the requirements and protocols of getting into the kingdom. He simply got on a plane and set off for the middle east. Of course, even then things went wrong. He was carted off the plane at the Jedda airport, apparently under the influence of alcohol. However he managed to say to some one that he was going to Lockheed before he succumbed and passed out. In fact he passed away.
It came as a hell of a shock to the company to find that this late arrival had managed to get as far as Jedda without all the neccesary visa's and other documentation being in place. My manager, Colin Reed, went to the airport, but immediatley sent for the company doctor, Dr Hindi. He pronounced the man dead. Very sad event as it turned out.

The Condor situation ultimately resolved itself after the company decided to cannibalise one of them to make sure the others went to their respective locations.
I did come across one, two years or so later when I was in charge of all the maintenance at Gassim airport. It was lying dead to the world. it's windows all smashed out, and desert dust lying thick on the carpets. Bits and pieces had been removed, including the small generator. I had hoped that the genny was still there. I had a job for one. But no such luck.
After the situation in Yemen had calmed down, and things got back to a state of 'normal', the Clerk of Works who had been overseeing the site works down there, had some sort of a bust up with the company and resigned. This left the post open. I was called into the managers office, a new guy since Bud Barbeau had ended his contract, and with another Brit who I cannot recall at the moment. This manager wanted me to be the next C-o-W in Sa'ana. I told him to shove it in no uncertain terms, but he insisted that I would go or else.
I told him the terms of my contract allowed me to refuse such an order. This he didn't believe, so I told him I would present my contract papers the next day and we would see who was right. He still would not let it go, and carried on in a typical militaristic fashion, (most of the management were ex military types), so I told him straight to his face that when the day came that I was expected to salute him, which his demeanour indicated that was more or less what he expected, That would be the day I went to my villa and stayed there until my travel arrangements were finalised. He went on and on about it, until I semi capitulated,'Right then,' I said, 'fit me up with an M16 or an AK47 and a bucket full of bullets and I'll go.'
'I'll make sure thay give you a f...ing medal if you get shot.' he responded.
'And I'll pin it to your asshole'. I shouted back, and left the office and him fuming that this cheeky little Brit had the effrontry to speak to him like that.
I did show him my paperwork the following day, and it proved to him that I was right, but to hark back to a point I made earlier, it also showed that I was actually on the wrong contract and should have been working elsewhere. I should have been working a six day week for less money, on the Ground Environment Programme, but by then I had become part of the ATC setup to such a degree that they persuaded me to sign a new, ATC, contract. Otherwise I would have been leaving the Kingdom three months earlier than I anticipated. The panic in Yemen went away, and the idea of my being tranferred there went with it.

John
Next episode, 'The Donkey Circle'

21/12/2003

POWER OF THE HEAVENS !

On the construction site we had an old desert arab who had given up the idea of living in the city as a bad move, and preferred to live as his forefathers had lived, in a tent, on the fringes of the city, and by doing any and everything that would fetch a few Riyals into his pocket. One of the little jobs he did was cleaning up around the site. He had collected a few old oil drums and had cut off the tops and placed them at strategic points about the place. One of these was outside the door of my steel container office. One day in early spring, the weather had changed from bright and sunny, normal in other words, to grey and overcast. There was a definite feeling of gloom about, so much so that I was compelled to have lights on in the office. Just before mid day the heavens opened and the rain came down. Prior to this, the old arab had emptied the drum outside the office door. He used to trundle an old wooden wheel barrow about the site. and in order to cut down on his trip lengths he had extended the sides with some pieces of old plywood so that the barrow became twice as deep as it was without the ply. In this deepened barrow he would pile up all the old plastic bags, lunch bags and such, including all the waste from my office. He had barely left the side of my office when it began to rain. It rained solidly for twenty five minutes then ceased abruptly. There was a period of deathly silence for about ten minutes, than it began to thunder in the distance. The noise came nearer and nearer until suddenly just a few metres away from the office bolts of lightening were striking the ground causing craters of about a metre across to appear.About five minutes before the rain started, Loweell Gresham had paid me a visit, he was about to leave for California, and had come to check the site over for the last time. We were standing by the window when the lightning strikes were occuring. He suddenly became panicked by this heavenly display, and said to me, 'To hell with this, I'm off, if one of those strikes this cabin, it will become the biggest bloody microwave cooker in Saudi Arabia, and I don't want any of that'. He went out of the door like a shot. Unfortunately that was the last time I saw Lowell, he was great fun to be with. I had followed him to the door, and after he had departed into his vehicle , and left I stood there gazing after him for a while, It was then that I noticed that the drum, which had been bone dry some thirty miniutes or so earlier was now half full. That gave some idea of the amount of rain that came down in that short but exceptionally sharp storm.
One time we were going down to Grove Sanska office together, this was another day that there had been a downpour. The streets at that time had no drainage, and all the kerbs were under a pool of dirty brown muddy water. We were driving up this one street, when we saw what Lowell said was a Mullah or Imam walking along the sidewalk. He deliberately drove the vehicle, a General Motors Blazer, into the long strip of water in order to spray this arab chap . But believe it or not the water went up and over the top of him and he never had a drop hit him. Lowell commented, 'Allah must be watching out for him today'. I was stunned by the fact that the guy had escaped getting soaked so mysteriously.
Another queer and even more weird thing happened to me one day. I was into photography quite a bit , and was contemplating buying a complete new outfit, but at the moment had an old Russian Zenith camera with a couple of ancillary lenses. One of these was a 200 mm telephoto lens. It had been required that Lowell Gresham go to the radar site at Mecca out station to check that things of a constructional nature were going to plan. This meant a long drive up to the checkpoint outside Mecca itself and a short drive, accompanied by a guard to make sure we only went as far as the outstation. The outstation was perched up on top of a rocky crag, and stood some height above ground level. To get to it, the vehicle had to be driven up a steeply sloping rough track. This we did and finished up right up high, and overlooking Mecca itself. Now here was an opportunity not to be missed, photos of the forbidden city, the centre of Islam. What a scoop. Or so I thought.
Anyway out came the camera with the 200mm telephoto lens, click went the shutter about six or seven times, and away went the camera, back into it's bag.
Now, I had been taking photos to send home for a few days prior to visiting Mecca, and afterwards added some more shots taken about the compound area.
It was not good policy to have photos processed in Saudi at that time, as you could never tell if the processing would be good or if the processor would find something to object to in the finished prints, so most of us sent films home with people going on vacation. They would bring them back when they returned, duly processed and printed. When my prints came back, all the ones taken before the Mecca visit were perfect, as were the ones taken after, but those taken as I overlooked Mecaca were virtually blanked out.
What a mystery!
As the construction work was completed, all sorts of little and some not so little, snags began to show up. One of them being the fact that the 'Library' department that was due to run off multiple copies of documents for the use of Air Force students in the education block, could not do so. The reason became quite a problem for Bill Hahn the Technical manager as his staff were unable to secure a place in which to install the web offset printing plant that was on site but still wrapped up in polythgene sheeting in the logistics storage area.
Up to that time, the maintenance crew which consisted of about four men including by now, myself, were still awaiting tools and equipment that should have been on site months previously. I was in the room designated as our workshop one day when the thought struck me that our workshop would be far better suited to Bill Hahn's requirements than our. Ours in fact could be well catered for by using the old M & L centre, which was about two hundred metres away across the desert sand. I broached the subject of this to Bill Hahn, who immediatly took it up with the overall general manager and Mo Dabbagh the Saudi Director. The move was decided upon as a darn good idea and was put into effect forthwith. The other guys were not pleased at first until I pointed out that they would be out of sight and to a great degree out of mind. They would have no Yanks looking over their shoulders all the time, and, as had been the practice so far, asking what they were doing eternally to our annoyance. As I said at the time, better to be less comfortable than more harrased than needs be. This idea took hold and more enthusiasm became evident.
Later on Bill Hahn called me into his office to tell me that the company had been saved some 44 thousand dollars through my suggestion and that he had put my name forward for an award as result. I asked what, in his estimation , would that mean to me. I guess a reward of perhaps ten per cent he thought.
$4400 would go into my bank account very nicely, I thought, as I left his office.
Some time later I was called to the general managers office, Mr. Charles 'Chuck' Boyles said the prism shaped block on the front of his desk. 'Come in and take a seat Jorrrn' he drawled in his heavily accented manner. Bill Hahn was standing over to one side and a female secretary was also in the room. ' I have called you here this morning to present you with an award for the suggestion that has saved the company a substantial amount of money, time and effort.'
He stood up and picking up what I thought was his coffee mug, a standard type mug with the Lockheed logo emblazoned on it, he handed me the mug.
'Thanks for your contribution'. he added and sat down again. I was stunned. I took the mug and went out closely followed by Bill Hahn.' John' he said,' I am disgusted, I really thought you would have received a cash award.' Don't fret about it I told him, I know you tried to get some cash for me, but I know one thing at least,, I told him, 'any good ideas I get in future I will keep to myself,' and stuff Lockheed. I dropped the mug into the waste bin as I went out of the office.
Once my tenure as Clerk of works was at an end, I went back into the maintenance crew, supposedly until the company decided what to do with me, but I think the manager Colin Reed kept me available because I had become the 'unofficial' buyer for the company due to both my general technical knowledge of not only construction matters but also my basic knowledge of electronics.The official buyers, who were mainly nationals of other arab states were employed because they were arabic speakers, but technically they were useless. Whenever they met a blockage in procuring certain items, they would come back to the department for further instruction, wheras, in my case, I was sufficiently aware of the matter in hand to be able to allow me to seek out alternative items.
This I think suited mt department head, added to which was the prescence of Mr. Mo Dabbagh. He knew my tenuous situation and virtually kidnapped me for his own staff. How that came about was due to an occurance one day that left him fuming in anger and frustration. It started when he found that a certain job he was waiting to be completed had dragged on and on, He found out that the Egyptian buyer had been unable to obtain certain things that where essential to complete the task. In passing me in a corridor he asked why I had not been able to get the parts required, I told him I knew nothing about it as they had taken the company car of me and I was therefore grounded and left twiddling my thumbs as a result. He rang up Colin Reed and told him that I was to only be ordered by himself, Mo Dabbagh in future, and that he would provide transport at his own expense. He gave me the keys to his GM 'Sport van and told me to get them back to him whenever he neede the van. This was freedom with a big FREE. I was elated at the turn of events as it meant I could come and go as I pleased, and my did I please. I used to roll up to the site whenever I pleased, usually about 10am every morning, then go all around the various departments to see if anyone wanted things from the markets or specialist suppliers down town. This went on until the end of my contract almost. I had a totally free hand, and was absolutely protected by the head guy himself.
In the middle of the M & L centre was a room that had not been called into use, so a young Indian guy negotiated a deal with someone to allow him to run a small canteen in that room. He turned up each morning with sandwiches, soft drinks and various confectionary items, Mars bars and Snickers etc.
Across the corridor was a window that gave a view of the general office area where all the typists and clerks worked. On one particular morning, there was a visit by all the major big wigs from the Lockheed HQ in California. Heading up the phlange of 'suits' was Mo Dabbagh. He spotted me through that window as I was on my way to the sandwich bar. He stopped in his tracks and gestured toi me to come in to him. I did so and waling up to him asked him waht he wanted. In respect of the fact that he had this cluster of 'important' folk all around him I addressed him as Mr. Dabbagh. He gave me look fit to kill and said in a very loud voice, ' I've told you to call me MO' haven't I.?' Yes I responded,
'Right, then do as you're told,'
' Right Mo, what do you want.?
' Take my Merc around to the mechanics and get four new tyres put on the wheels, and don't forget the spare, and make sure YOURSELF that they are all inflated correctly.'
He gave me the keys and I turned away to do as he requested. As I went out of the door, I heard him say again again in a loud voice, 'That is the only guy around here I can trust, and that includes most of you lot as well.'
I was really embarrassed,as these were all the top eschelon of the company, but knew his reasons for saying that. I fully expected some sort of comeback over that incident but nothing happened, at least not that I was then aware of.
That will be all for now,
Soon the incident at the 'Donkey Circle.'

John

22/12/2003

The Donkey Circle Incident.

At the juction of Palestine Street and the Airport Road, there was at the time I arrived in Saudi, a roundabout. This was known as 'The Donkey Circle'. The reason for that was the fact that, during that period there was a massive building boom taking place all over Saudi, in particular, the Jedda city area. People were descending on Jedda from all over the middle east, especially Yemen and Palestine. There was plenty of work about, but unlike the USA and the UK there were no labour exchanges as such. What there was were informal gathering places such as this roundabout. Here every morning building labour would stand, usually with their donkey's, (hence the name of the place), until an employer arrived to negotiate a price for the day. Then he would give the address to be worked at, or take the man with his tools in the back of his truck, off to the site wherever that may be.

On the north west corner of this roundabout, someone commenced building a large villa. The building was not of european style, but would have been roughly equal in size to small manor house in UK terms. All around this villa they had constructed a wall some two or so metres high. All the building was done in concrete with liberal use of standard concrete blocks. In order to complete the place and make it cosmetically appealing, the whole house was being slowly covered in that horrible sort of finish that was quite popular in the UK for a short while some years ago, External stone cladding.
It came to pass that the local authority decided to do away with this roundabout and in it's place erect a flyover. This was not done in isolation, it was part of the general upgrading being performed on all the major roads in the city. Anyway, as the method of alteration and modification was simply to get on with it, unlike the UK with it's interminable planning procedures, they simple turned up and started work. The outfit doing the work was from Korea and most of the employees therefore Korean. There were lots of Koreans working in Saudi at the time as the expatriot work force waxed and waned from one source of labour to another according to arrangements between the Saudi and other various governments. The speed at which these modificatons and alterations took place was incredible, and the whole flyover was completed and open to traffic within some ten weeks. In the meanwhile, the side slip roads were to be set into place, and unfortunately for the owner of the new villa on the corner, the place was right slap bang where the slip road would be, or at least half of it was. Now for months, ever since the building had been going on the house, as one part was completed, this little old arab chap had been doing his thing with the stone cladding. He had pallets full of the stuff at the rear of the building, and could often be seen wheeling a barrow full of slabs of stone from these pallets to wherever he happened to be sticking them on to he surface of the place. As the flyover went ahead, they came along and started to tear down the front part of this new house. never been lived in even. They got so far, far enough to clear the way for the slip road, and left the rest standing. So there was this half shell of a house, surely now abandoned by it's owner, buy with the mason chap still sicking claddind to the rear of the perimeter walls. He actually carried on to completion. What a farcical situation.

I was wandering down the souk area one Thursday, for once the weather was quite cool, about 45degrees or so, so I decided to walk part of the way back to the compound, This was due to a request by a Brit, that I call into the Lufthansa airline office to get some info on flights etc. I was about a half klick (kilometre) from the Lufthansa place when I spotted a couple of cars on the side of the road in a ditrssed condition. Wrecked in other words. That was nothing new to see in Jedda as the street were littered with smashed cars. The whole place was constantly akin to a race track, and one had to take extreme caution whenevr driving about the city. The cars I had spotted were not the ordinary Toyota or Nissan, no sir, they were far more exotic than that. There was a De Lorean, a de Soto, a Ferrari, and a couple of Mini's, further along was a Rolls Royce. They were all extremely. .dead!

By co incidence, the guy who had asked me to go to the airline office had been telling me about his interest in such tpes of cars, so when I returned to the compound later I sought him out and told him about these wrecks. As you may well imagine my story was alughed at, it was his idea that I had made up the situation because I knew he was keen on these makes of car. I suggested we take a vehicle out and I would show him the scene he so obviously could not accept as true. He agrred to the idea, so off we went down the Medina Road into the place, near to the Foreign Ministry just to the north of the Red Sea Hotel.

We got out of the car and he was shocked beyond words. I swear I saw tears in his eyes as he witnessed the scene of the crashing of his dreams and desires. He was, like the rest of us, hardly able to afford to buy a Ford Cortina, never mind a Ferrari, or certainly a De Lorean. Here was a pile of the most desirable of cars in a state of utter wretchedness. I do believe that he actually went to the police to see if he could take ownership of one or other of them, but was turned down flat. They didn't wat the hassle of seeking out absent owners I suppose.

A few months later the Governor of Mecca, who had resposibility for the Jedda region, visited the city and was apparently so disgusted by the amount of abandoned vehicles lying all over the place that he ordered a clean up campaign. The Arab News reported that a total of over 80,000 were cleared away to the side of the Red Sea, and were used as a base for the new public transport terminal, the new fish market and as base for the shipbuilding yard to the southern end of the shore.
So some time in the future no doubt archeologists will discover the bones of all these cars and trucks and wonder just how the situation arose.
After the flyover was completed at the old Donkey Circle, they then started on the rest of the road works. The reason for the uprading of the Airport Road was to facilitate the access to the Islamic Port of Jedda. The flyover was extended along the route of the Airport Road, and was later to be nicknamed 'The Flyway in the Sky'.
Some notice was given yto residents I believe, that the works would involve the demolition of some hundreds of houses and apartments that lay along the proposed route. I know that some Yanks were keeping females in rented units in and around this area, and were suddenly told that they should find alternative places for their 'friends'. As there were also hundreds of local citizens also now on the hunt for accommodation, there was quite a lot of peole lost partt time 'wives, as the women had to disappear before the authorities found out about them. IT seemed that all the planning had been attended to and one day the bulldozers moved in, about four or so of them, they simply headed south with their shovel s dropped and cleared everything i their path. Not many weeks later the extended flyover was under construction. Again there were many buildings left half standing as the demolition crews simply took down what was in the way of the road. If it didn't interfere, it stayed upright.
Later on again, a forest of 27 tower cranes reached for the sky as the French Bourgoys Company set to to build 27 blocks of twenty story flats. They soon filled up once completed. They had a lovely view over the old airport.

With all this modernisation going on you would think that there would be next to nothing left of the traditional. Wrong. behind the Red Sea Hotel was the Lagoon. I went down town one Friday(Sunday remember) morning quite early, there was a sort of a mist anging over the Lagoon, and as I passed over the sea side bridge, I slowed to see what was moving about in the water. I saw an arab fisherman, or at least the head of one, he was standing up to his neck in the water casting a small light net across in front of him, It was a picture of pure delight I thought at the time.
Also as a one time shipyard worker, I had worked on the Windsor Castle and others in Cammell Lairds and the Oriana in Barrow in Furness, I was quite interested to see the work being done at the ship yard down by the docks. I was quite impressed to see the carpenters as they swung adzes to and fro, chipping away at timbers, as the dhow, (arab sea going boat) slowly rose from it's keel. Through an interpreter, I discovered that they worked completely from knowledge and experience, as a team, and without any sort of paper plans. That was real carpentry I thought to myself.
A final word about the Donkey Circle.
When I returned to Saudi Arabia a couple of years later It was pointed out to me by an arab aquaintance thta Idi Amin was living in a villa on the opposite side of the flyover I wrote about earlier. The Saudi's had accepted him as a refugee when the world turned against him. No doubt the millions, if not billions of dollars, he had salted away from Uganda helped in their decision, I doubt that, if an ordinary citizen of Uganda sought refuge in the kingdom a totally different attitude would have been to the front.

More to come soon.

Next time it will be the Illegal and the Illuminating.

23/12/2003

Some more from the sandy place.

Illegal and Illuminating.

I mentioned the booze stocks that Mo Dabagh placed in front of me at his temporary accomodation, well there were others that found it a lucrative trade to deal in the best of the West as far as drinks went.
I also mentioned the fact that Mo had 'given' me a panel van for the duration, that is until he required that I return it.
Well one afternoon, a Yank asked me to borrow this van, but I was under strict orders from Mo not to turn the keys over to anyone without his express permission, so I had to refuse. The white van was very conspicuous in that it bore the emblem of the Royal Saudi Air force on both driver side and passenger side doors. Any person driving it about had to have a chitty from the Director. I had such a document which I carried with me at all times. If I had given the keys to another person and they had been stopped by the police, all hell would have broken out, not to mention the fact that they would most certainly would have spent some time in the local nick, until it had been all sorted out that is.
I didn't want to appear mean, so I suggested that I drive the van for him so that it would be all ok if anything caught the eye of an official. I really believed that the idea was to collect and deliver to another address, some furniture or similar such items.
We drove off to an address over on the other side of the Mecca Road, at the far side of the old airport. I stopped outside the indicated address, and waited whilst the Yank disappeared inside the walled garden of a private villa. After a while the Yank and an arab chap, quite well heeled by the looked of him and his villa, came back to the van. The arab instructed me to drive some way up towards Mecca, then told me to take a left turn off the main highway on to a rough track that led out into the desert. We travelled this track for about ten klicks (kilometres) then he told me to turn off across the desert proper. We were on this unmarked route for some half an hour, by which time it was rapidly turning dark. It was quite a bright evening as there was a full moon and the stars were exceptionally bright and not twinkling like they do in the UK. Sudeenly he told me to stop and leave the headlights full on as they had been for some time. He got out of the van and wakled a short way across the sand until he stopped by what appeared to be a clump of desert scrub bushes. Reaching down to the ground he grabbed hold of something and began to try lifting whatever it was he had grasped. The Yank went over to his side and between them they managed to hoist a metal door upwards. I drove the van nearer to where they were standing, and could then see that the door was one of a pair that were attached to the rear end of a steel shipping container that had been set end on into the ground.
The arab disappeared down into the container and I could see that there was an aluminium ladder attached to the inside of the container. After a few moments the arab started up a small generator and a shaft of light shot up into the night sky. I could now see that there were rows of shelves all the way down to the bottom of the container and each shelf was loaded with cardboard boxes. The arab started passing some of the boxes up towards myself and the yank, we then loaded some thirty boxes into the van. Without further ado, the container was closed up and sand kicked all over it . He asked me to run the van round and round in circles as though there had been someone driving about for fun. We then retraced our tracks, until we got back onto the Mecca Road again. We spent some hours then delivering the boxes all over the place, and finished about two in the morning. I was paid two thousand riyals for my help. That was about £300 at the time. Not bad money for a few hours out of my leisure time. It was a good job we were not stopped though, the boxes contained bottles of whiskey and other spirits. Mind you, had I thought about doing a return trip to the buried container, I doubt that I would have been successful, I had absolutely no idea where the heck it was. I may have found the desert track but beyond that I would have soon been lost. How the arab knew just how to arrive at the exact spot I cannot work out, but he sure did so and without the merest hint of a mistake.
Near to the company offices were a few blocks of apartment buildings. Residing in one of these apartments was a Yank, he had quite a reputation amongst the expats for brewing a reasonable supply of 'sid', siddiqui that is. This is an arabic word meaning 'friend', in rough translation. A sort of gin type spirit. As it comes it is very potent and is usually 'cut' to lesser strength with water. Afterwards it was good policy to blend it with pepsi cola or orange or something. On it's own it rapidly became quite addictive. There were quite a few persons shipped out of the place after getting 'sid' on the brain.
This Yank had gone off on vacation to the States, and he left a friend, an Indian or Pakistani or a Philipino, I never knew which, in charge of his still. This 'friend' decided to hurry things along a bit, with the brew that was simmering away. He turned up the heat beneath it. The result of this act of impatience being that the whole shebang blew up with a loud explosion. It shattered the front of the Yank's apartment and within minutes the police were all over the place. Needless to say, the Yank failed to return. This was the manner in which a few people left the country. First they would do something that would bring the police into the scene, then they would be notified one way or another to stay where they were. If they did return the chances were that they would fetch up in prison. Not a pleasant place to spend time.
I recall that one of the company managers went 'over the wall' so to speak, by 'borrowing' the company pleasure boat and sailing it out at night across the Red Sea. He was the personnel manager, 'Chuck' Rogers was his name I seem to remember. I believe his 'crime' was to do with dealing in booze.
Now for a little bit to show how things were done so differently than in the West.
If you have ever tried to buy a brand new car, in the UK especially, you will know that it can be quite a protracted procedure. It can take a couple of days or even longer to get it all sorted out.
I had occasion to go to a certain workshop to obtain parts for an air conditioning unit for a General Motors pick up truck. As luck would have it, I arrived just as salah (prayer time) was about to commence. They told me to return in an hour. A few doors away was a car showroom with very large plate glass sliding doors across the front. This place sold Rolls Royce cars. and there were three on display, A white one, a black one, and a gold one. The models I did not know as I have no interest in expensive cars. I went inside, to kill some time. As the arabs are usually kind enough to offer a cup of tea or a pepsi, and rather than wait about in the street, a visit to the Rolls showroom may well be enlightening. Whilst I was talking to the salesmanager, he was Palestinian, or Philistine as the arabs call the Palestinians, an old wrinkled arab chap came in.
He spoke a few sentances in rapid arabic, pointed out the gold Roller and laid a heavy bag on the desk. The salesman opened up the bag and tipped out five or six 1kg gold ingots onto the desk. After some haggling which appeared to me to be a blazing row, they shook hands, they gave the guy the keys to the gold roller and he drove out of the shop ...straight into the side of an army twenty ton tank carrier, with a tank on the back.

Everyone got rather aeriated, there was lots of fist waving and shouting, then all of a sudden it was all over. The poor gold Roller was a write off, the old guy was now calmed down and came straight back into the shop and bought the white Roller by the same method of payment. This time he drove a bit more cautiously and without as much as a wave goodbye, simply slid out into the traffic and was gone. As the arab was about half a foot shorter than me, I wondered just how he managed to reach the pedals, although it was an automatic, perhaps that helped.
I stood with the sales manager drinking my cup of tea, totally amazed at the whole episode. I think the sales manager was bamboozled also. But the smile on his face told a whole lot about his attitude to such a show of affluence.He like me was probably on a monthly salary that would have paled into insignificence compared to just one of those bars of gold.
Somehow I could not envisage this taking place in any Western country.

More to come

29/12/2003

First I must aplolgise to Frank Skelly, I seem to remember now that he was in fact a Manchester lad not a scouser.
That out of the way, I will now relate the incident of the Prince and the wronged boys.
It came about like this, there was a Swedish Amarican guy in one of the compounds, his name I have forgotten, but he had two daughters and a son I think. The eldest daughter was a very nice girl, not too good looking, but certainly not a 'dog', to use the American vernacular for a real ugly.
This girl, Rhonda by name, was somehow introduced to a certain Prince Bandar. He in turn, took a deep liking for, and had a great attachment to Rhonda, so it seems. So much so that he spent quite large sums of money buying her lots of very expensive jewellry. She showed me a watch made from a solid gold American Eagle one day, hand made into a wrist watch by craftsmen in Switzerland she told me. She could be witnessed showing off her trophies to any and all who would listen. Don't get me wrong, for all her showiness, she was a lovely natured and exceptionally pleasant person. One of the prime rules however was spelled out to all by the company, do not fraternise with the Saudi's, first and foremost they could be getting themselves into serious hot water with their own authorities and in particular with the religious establishment, a very, very conservative organisation.
Anyway, she chose to ignore the well meant advice, and went ahead with the liason, or should I say affair with this well to do Saudi chap.I don't doubt she had deep feelings for the guy, I would not like to think she was simply gold digging.
After some time, she fell to the inevitable, she became pregnant. The news no doubt struck her family very hard, so much so, that her father insisted she travel back to the States, with the object of terminating the pregnancy. She followed her fathers instructions to the letter, and subsequently the termination went ahead.

After weeks of correspondence by letter and telephone, the Saudi guy became aware of the terrible news that his child had been erased, murdered he called it. He was understandably enraged at this fact and appeared to have lost the plot over the termination. Of course she had told him that her father had insisted upon the course of action taken, thereby shifting the blame. Saudi girls do exactly as daddy tells them to do, so I supposed the Prince believed the same of American girls. So the father became the hated enemy that the Prince would seek revenge on.

Up until a few weeks prior to these events taking place, the father had been residing in Kheriji compound, as a single man, but immediately his family had arrived in the kingdom, the company moved him and his family into another compound.
In his rage the Saudi, who it appeared only was aware of the place where the Swede had lived before, came banging on the door of the apartment some time after midnight. The new occupant of the apartment, knowing nothing about the liason between the the girl and the Prince, came to the door and denied all knowledge of the new whereabouts of the father of the absent girl. This chap, a Brit, Chris Williams by name, suddenly found himself not only staring down the barrel of a pistol, but being ordered, along with his flatmate, an American, and also ignorant of the facts, to get down the stairs to the waiting car that the Prince had arrived at the compound in. As luck would have it, with all the shouting and ruckus going on, the gate guard, a local chap, famous to us all because he had six toes on each foot, had clocked the number of the car, and as soon as it had left the compound, he contacted the police to report the incident.
Had I, or any intelligent sort of chap, been doing the abducting, we would doubtless have brought the abductees back, but only so far, then left them to make their own way home from a distance. Not our Prince, Oh! no he had to do the right thing and dump them right outside the apartment door. Whereupon the police, who had been in the compound asking questions, neatly nabbed him. This was after some hours during which period the Prince had been driving like a maniac all over the desert issuing threats against the lives of the two who were taken, unless they of course divulged the location of the girls father. As his temper abated, and no doubt as he tired of issuing threats with little positive response, he called the thing off. Later the prince was charged with attemped murder and kidnapping but subsequently the charges were dropped and he escaped any form of censure.
I am not sure if it is the same Prince Bandar, but of recent times a Prince of that name has been the Saudi Ambassador to the USA, Bandar is a fairly common name in the middle east, so perhaps it was a different prince. At the end of it all, the Swedish-American guy, did a runner, by the usual means, he went on vacation and did not return. His family were only able to leave after protracted negotiations with the authorities I believe.

Many persons left the kingdom under a cloud, or at least clouds gathered after they had left, which meant messages being sent out of country informing them their presence was no longer required.

Driving I have mentioned previously, but how aboout this for a occurence. We had a Brit, who decided to spend the bulk of his vacation driving home to the UK, and returning by the sane route, He managed to get all the way to the UK and back without so much as a puncture. However, just as he turned into the street to enter the compound, a Saudi car ran into him. Of course it was his fault entirely, because had he not been in the kingdom the accident wouldn't have happened. He was only a Khowadji ( foreigner, one who has not made haddj) after all, whereas the Saudi had every right to be there.
A similar incident occurred to myself. I mentioned the Somali village some pages ago. One day I had been down town for something or other and accompanied by a very nervy Brit, who had only been inthe kingdom a few days, I was travelling back to the construction site having completed my search for whatever.
Unlike normal I was driving a GM flatbed truck of some three tons capacity, the truck had a surround frame work on either side, similar in style to a ranch type fence, witha drop down tail gate in similar fashion.
As we approached the main street in the village, I slowed to take a right turn, and came to a stop to allow traffic to pass ubtil I had a clear exit. Suddenly three Land Rovers came down the street at a high speed, as they came to the junction where we were waiting they decided to take a right turn into the road we were stopped in. The first and second cleard the side of our truck with fractions to spare, the third whoever struck the side of the truck a slight blow near to the rear tailgate.
Now the young Brit sitting beside me became extremely agitated, obviously thinking we were about to land in gaol. Some of the other men had been priming him with all sorts of terrifying tales of the actions taken by the police if westerners were involved in traffic accidents.
The driver of the last Land Rover, had stopped by this time and was ranting and raving in a screaming diatribe of invective,patently decalring our presence to be the cause of the situation. I leaned out of the cab, and gave hime a single finger salute, in ither words I was telling him to go stuff himself. The guy with me now began to make as though he would run away, but I restarined him, I knew if he ran off the police would make issue of the fact and it would just pile fuel onto the already inflamed situation. I grabbed his arm and held him in his seat, at the same time I pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes and putting my feet up onto the dashboard presented a picture of nonchalance that I certainly was not really feeling. I could see under the brim of the cap that there was a small Somali chap standing on the corner, and who had obviously witnessed all these goings on. I waved over to him, indicating for him to come over to speak to me. He came over and I found his english to be more than adequate. I asked him to translate for me with the irate arab.
'He said it was your fault because you are not a Saudi therefore you are in the wrong'.
'So tell him it was him driving like a maniac, I was stopped still waiting to turn out of this road'
He did the translation, but the Saudi just went on and on about having all the rights etc, etc,
I asked the Somali if there was any damage to the side of the Land Rover. He went across, and came back to say no, but there was a smaear of red paint off my truck where the Land Rover had scraped against the side.
'Tell him I work for the King, and the King has invited me to be here to work for him' I said.
This he did, but it cut no ice. He still went on and on, he also by this time had been joined by his fellow arabs from the other Land Rovers, they had turned and come back to the scene when they realised he was no longer trailing them.
They now joined in the cacophony. To have one maddened arab screeching in your ear is bad enough, but believe me, five or six all trying to reach the ears of heaven with their voices at fever pitch is, unpleasant to say the very least.
Suddenly I had an idea.
I said to the Somali guy, 'Ask them are they good muslims'
he did so, and came back to say they all say 'Of course.'
'Right then, I told him, go to the one who was driving the last Land Rover and tell him that as he had 'stolen' red paint from my, ergo, the Kings truck, I should report him to the King for stealing the paint'.
The reaction was instantaneous, The all piled into their respective vehicles and were gone in a matter of moments.
The Brit sitting beside me let out a sigh of obvious relief. On the other hand the Somali interpreter was grinning from ear to ear.'
' Mister' he said, 'I have never seen Saudi's move so fast', and he shook my hand, obviously very amused. It was at that moment the police arrived, just as I let the gears in and moved off on my way.
I used to see that Somali guy quite often after that, I gave him a lift a few times, and he always referred to the incident with a big smile on his face.
When we returned to the site, the young Brit gave chapter and verse to anyone who would listen, 'So I had escaped yet again' seemed to be the consensus of opinion.
It was a regular event that I had a brush with some arab or police man, and, yes, I did always seem to scrape through somehow.
Next...electrics and explosions (again)
03/01/2004

Electrics and explosions (again).

From the beginning of my stay in Saudi Arabia, the normal way to get from the compound to the work site, was by the eponymous American yellow school bus. How the heck the American school kids travel to and from school each day in one of those mobile torture chambers eludes me entirely. The Yanks should be prosecuted for child abuse. However, as I was about to say, for a short period of time I was compelled to get to work as did everyone else, in the 'yellow peril'.
Most of the journey to the site was along roads that were perfectly good tarmacadamed surfaces.The roads were laid out in the Philadelphia style, that is, in regular evenly spaced 'blocks', but with no buildings in between each road. The construction would come later, as I said earlier, Jedda at the time was nothing if not a massive big construction site. The city was expanding in rapid response to the amount of money being spent, which in turn was encouraging the influx of many workers from all over the world especially the middle eastern muslim countries. Soon enough, these open tracts of land, bounded by strips of 'blacktop', would be seeing the concrete mixers and building workers doing their thing, erecting all manner of buildings from houses to apartment buildings, shops and clinics and anything else that would be needed to serve the community.
Along the side of the airport that housed our work site there was a brand new road laid, dual carriageway, with a wide central reservation. This was broken at each junction by a space, but in all honesty it was a work of art. The work was done by a Korean company and they spared no expense in making sure it was done to perfection. The lengh of this road was at least three kilometres from the Somali village end to the far end of the back end of the airport perimeter.
I would guess it was no more than a week after the whole road was completed, that another company came along and dug a trench right up the centre of the central reservation, from the Somali village end right to the other end, and commenced to install cables. They closed all the trench as they laid the cables. After about two weeks or so, this task was complete. All the central reservation was made by laid slabs surrounded by typical concrete kerbs, just as would be seen in the Uk and most western countries. Anyway it was all put back as the Koreans had left it when they finished the road in the first place. No sooner had the cables been laid and all the works put back in good order, than along came another company to dig up patches on every section of the central reservation, this time to install lamp posts.I was convinced by this time that either someone was very bad at planning work schedules, or that some corruption was in hand. Knowing the way things were going on in the country at the time, I am sure it was the second option that was the correct one.
One morning as the bus had just turned up one of these open aspected roads, a small blue Nissan car overtook it at speed, the car carried on under acceleration towards the new road just mentioned above. Unfortunately, the end of the road we were on at the time ended in a 't' junction with the new Korean road, for whatever reason the driver of the blue Nissan did not seem to realise that he was rapidly running out of road, until that is, he suddenly became aware the the road was about to terminate at the junction. We saw his frantic attempt to turn the car into the road ahead, but he was going so fast he had little chance and the car went into a roll over situation. It spun and rolled around the corner at the junction, finally coming to rest about two hundred metres down towards the Somali village. Our driver stopped at the junction, curiosity no doubt uppermost in his mind, as to what fate the two in the car had managed to find after such a violent incident. The next thing we saw was two arabs clad in white thobes, the traditional clothing in Saudi Arabia, scrambling out of the car, one on either side, through the front door window spaces. They both staggered to their feet, one went over to the side of the kerb and sat down holding his head in his hands, the other came across the to the opposite side of the road, pulled up his thobe above his waist, and proceeded to defacate( do his business as we might say). Our bus turned away just then and proceeded towards our place of work. Most of the bus was in a state of high amusement at the scene. But I think some of the women were not too pleased at what they had just witnessed, a few American women were very prudish I found.
Not to be out done by the rest of the personnel planning to have vacations, (holidays,) in all sorts of exotic places, and travelling by a diversity of means, I wrote to my then wife to see if there was anywhere in particular she would like to go to. Thinking I may be off to Egypt or Thailand or somewhere just as interesting, I was a bit diasppointed to learn that she wanted to visit the Kerkenhof Gardens in Holland. That for thos ewho don't know about the place is a sort of mecca for tulip lovers.
So, having told her she could more or less go anywhere, I had to accept my fate and book my next vacation route to take me to Belgium, so That I could meet up with her at Ostend. I did all the booking for both of us through the company travel office, knowing that never having had experience of overseas travel my wife would be at a loss as to how to go about it all.
I arranged to fly from Jeddah to Brussels, the by train to Ostend. First however it meant a convoluted journey on a variety of routes just to get to Brussels. The first stop was to be Athens in Greece, There I was supposed to disembark and take another flight direct to Brussels. Some hopes. There was aterrorist threat at Athens and the airport was closed, we were diverted to Nice, in France. After sitting in an ever increasingly hotting up plane, all tye engines were shut down so there was no air conditioners working., I approached the pilot and requested that we be allowed off the plane. After all we were actually parked at the side of the Meditterranean sea. With the beach a few hundred yards to our left. The pilot who obviously didn't want a riot on his hands from the rising anger of the passengers, allowed us to get off, or at least some of us. The doors had been open for some time and there did not appear to be any movement with regards taking off again. The crew were negotiating it seems to get us a new flight plan due to the uncalled fro diversion from Athens. The airport people had broughta stairway to the side of the plane so we at least didn't have to jump out. The walk along the beach was very welcome after the overheated interior of the plane.
Some time went by and suddenly we were made aware that we were about to take off again, we got back into the plane and then we were off again, up into the sky. This time we landed at Lyon, again in France, but we were only on the ground for about ten minutes when we took off again. This time we landed at Frankfurt in Germany. Again we had to get off the aircraft, in order to take another flight to Brussels.Unfortunately for me, I was the only one actually transferring for brussles, and the last flight of that day had already left, the next one being 8-30am the following morning. I had virtually no loose money with me by this time. I had supposedly been going to be in Brussels the previous day at about four pm in the afternoon, and had had a meal on the plane just after we left Jedda, and nothing to eat since. My good fortune came in handy again though. Whilst trying to work out How I was going to survive on either a cup of coffee or a small bun, which was all my few coins would allowed, blow mw I came across one of the Yanks off the GEP programme with whom I had had a few drinks with a couple of times. This giant guy with a heart of gold, not to mention plenty of loose German Marks stood me a terrific breakfast. For which favour I still owe him a return if I ever meet him again some day.
That morning my plane was called for a gate somewhere over the far side of the airport. I must have passed through twenty doors, been scanned by security at each and every one, stared down the barrles of a similar number of automatic rifles and machine pitols, been glared at by many enormous German policemen, talk about a police state.
All this because a few manic rebels wanted to cause havoc for whatever agenda they were following.
Once on the plane to Brussels I really believed it was all behind me, well, so much for thought, After we landed at Brussels, we were compelled to walk some distance through a complex of temporary passageways and through a few plastic 'tunnels'; they were doing all sorts of modernisation works there at the time. As I walked under a overhead bridge affair made from scaffoling pipes, I was about ten or so metres ahead of the last persons in the crowd from the plane. Suddenly there was an almighty explosion, and the woman directly behind me came flying into the back of me, we both finished up in a heap on the floor. Within seconds there were police and security guards everywhere, helping us up, and hurrying us along towards a place further on. It came to light that some idiot had tossed a hand grenade over the bridge above as we walked along. A few people to my rear had slight injuries, and it was rumoured that one woman had later died, but I never confirmed this to be true.
To cap it all off, when we finally got to the famous Kerkenhof Gardens, the season was late and there were no blooms to be seen anywhere, just hectares of muddy
fields. A very, very, disappointing vacation, not to mention the cost of it all. I was really glad to get back to the relative peace and quiet of the desert kingdom a few weeks later at the end of my vacation.
Next,

'Then it all ended'

04/01/2004

Summing up and marsallamah (goodbye) you arab hordes!
Before I sum up and close my narrative, let me tell you another aspect of expatriot existance in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as I found it in the late 1970's, I doubt very much that things are any different today.
To get into the kingdom first you have to have a sponsor, this is usually an employer, but it could be a business partner, to hold a partnership with a Saudi you have to relinquish you total control in the enterprise. Usually this means allowing your Saudi partner to hold 51 percent of the equity in the company, there are ways around this, as in any business arrangement, 51 percent can be liberally interpreted, especially if the arab is not very competant in business acumen, but is nevertheless flush with the funds that you need to establish the company in the kingdom. Quite a few business's have been very successful and beneficial to both party's under such terms.
To return to the matter of entry into the kingdom, it is not an easy endeavour, and without some legitimate reason approved by the powers that be, is almost impossible. Then of course once in, comes the problem of getting out. That's a horse of a different jockey. You need to obtain an exit visa, now these come in a couple of shades, one is the final exit visa, which means you are no longer able to return, or there is the exit/re-entry type. This is the sort one would need if going out on a vacation with the intention of returning. On the other hand you may well need such a visa if you were about to depart for another Gulf State, to do business or attend a meeting, or even go off to America or the UK for similar reasons.
As my contract was nearing it's end, and having turned down the option to extend it, I went through the motions of obtaining my final exit visa. At the company HQ offices, the travel arrangments were being handled by the most beautiful of young women it has been my good fortune to have the aquaintanceship of. She was a Yemeni girl, very well endowed with lovely features, and a carcase one would normally only see in movies. I could go on but to what end. I liked immensly, not only was she gorgeous, but very clever and fluent in at least seven langauges to boot. I had the pleasure of sitting talking to her on many many occasions due to the fact that as a virtually free man within the company, I used to often attend to travel arrangements on behalf of Brits and Americans alike, and this meant sitting opposite her as she faced me from behind her desk.
On one occasion some of the senior American managers were summoned to Ontario, California for some very important budgetary meetings. The project was well over spent it seemed and questions were being asked by the Saudi's as to what was going wrong. Anyway the arrangement were made for all these managers to travel with the exception of one Yank whose passport was suddenly found to be missing. As it was too late in the day to get a replacement, and as it was impossible to leave the country without it, he had to forego the trip to the company HQ in the USA. It caused quite a fracas, because this particular manager was the guy in charge of the logistics department(stores), and it was his department that was in quite deep doodah over cost overuns etc.
It was all brushed under the carpet so to speak, and relegated to the dustbin of Saudi experience, along with all the rest of the SNAFU's (sytem normal all fouled up) that had occured over the many months of the programme.
So here I was many months later, around the last week in July 1979 patiently waiting on my Yemeni dream girl to do her thing with my travel arrangements. I sat drinking a cup of coffe and noticed that the desk was wobbling , there being a gap under one of the legs. I saw that there was a pice of cardboard of sorts that had obviously been placed under the leg sometime taht had slipped out, hence the wobbling desk. I did my gentlemanly thing and crouched down under the desk to retrieve the item with th intention of sticking back under the leg. I bet you've already guessed it.. this was the missing passport of the logistics manager that had gone awol all that time ago.
Like I said, she was ravishing, clever, very amusing to talk to, and I would have had her for my wife any day of the week, but, she had no realistic sense of responsibility.
Typically arab in fact.
Off to the airport at last.
The day finally came, I had all my money changed, all my expensive items packed up ready for the cargo hold, and all my documentation correct annd approved. In short, I was off home.
Friends took me to the airport, and a couple stayed with me until our flight was called and I moved across to the departure lounge. Prior to entry I had to go through the check in, at this point I expected to pay a substantial sum of cash to get my seriously overburdened luggage trolley through, the cost of excess baggage was just as much in those days as I am sure it still must be. I had kept back about a thousand Riyals for the purpose, however the guy checking me through, was an elderly arab with poor eyesight, I asked him how much he wanted to charge, and despite my stuff being weighed in at some three hundred kilo's he only asked for one hundred rats. Wow! I thought, that was good, I had expected maybe ten times that figure, but I was not about to argue. I handed him the hundred and was through to the gateway home.
As I sat waiting I heard the 'magic doorway' bell ring, and turned around to see who had slipped up by leaving his keys or something metallic on his person. There was a white guy, maybe Brit or American I thought, but later it turned out he was German, retracing his steps through the magic doorway. Again it rang, then again and again. Gradually he was stripping down to his pants and vest, but it still rang. At this point the security took him into the ladies inspection room, an enclosure with curtains hanging across the entrance. He came out after a while and they asked him to try it again, it still rang, so by this time everyone seated was waiting for something to happen, maybe he would be arrested or something, but no, they must have tired of the game and allowed him to dress. HE walked very stiffly across the departure lounge and sat down. The place returned to it's normal quiet routine.
On the plane home, I was overcome with what may have been a touch of food poisoning or some such, and I was actually carried off on a stretcher, I was carried into the first aid station at Heathrow and some time later was allowed out to be greeted by my wife and son in law who had come to the airport to collect me. The mound of goods on the trolley that had been offloaded in my absence caught up with me, and once customs had given me the all clear we departed for South Wales, and home.
There was one other matter that I had forgotten about that occured during the flight home on one of my vacations. This time I travelled to Cairo, as my last vaction had been to meet my wife and youngest daughter there for a two week stay in Egypt. The plane, a 'Jumbo' 747, was packed out with arabs returning home after making haddj (pilgrimage to Mecca). I was sitting reading the Arab News, a Saudi english language paper, when I realised there was some sort of hissing noise going on behind me, but nearby, The plane was really crowded and the sense of overloading that I felt was no doubt caused by the fact that all the passengers seemed to be wearing voluminous layers of clothing that flapped about loosely, some of the women passengers had been carrying large bundles on their heads as the boarded the plane, others and a lot of the men were hand carrying similar sized bundles. I know for a fact that westerners would never have been allowed on the plane carrying such enormous loads as hand baggage, but this was the middle east and it was a Egyptair flight, and, most of those on board were Egyptians.
To get back to the hissing noise. I turned around in my seat and noted that a scruffy little arab had lit a small camping stove in the aisle, and was obviously about to brew up a cuppa. I returned to reading my paper when it suddenly dawned on me waht I had witnessed. I started stabbing the call button on the side of the seat arm to alert a stewardess about it. I was reluctant to do anything about it myself as there were too many for me to take on should an argument ensue. The girl came along after a short while, in the main I think because I was pressing the call button incessantly. She spoke to me and asked that I stop pressing the button as She was very busy trying to keep some sort of order amongst these very undisciplined, and probably once in a lifetime air travellers. I grabbed her arm and made her look to my rear.
She stood up rigid with fright and imediately forced a path through the crowded aisle to re appear moments later with the pilot and a couple of male attendants.
The poor ignorant arab was lterally thrown out of the way as one of the attendants reached for the off knob on the stove. The other attendant and the pilot grabbed the offender and dragged him towards the tail of the cabin, then threw him into a tiolet where he was kept until the plane landed, They almost threw hi out of the plane at Cairo, into the arms of the police who, obviously having been informed of the situation , were waiting to take him away. I was very glad when the last plane I used during that period toched down at Heathrow.
What brought that incident back to mind was the plane crash just recently off the Red Sea coast at Sharm el Shaik in Egypt. I could so easily have been in the same situation had that stove caused the clothing of one or other of the passengers to catch fire. Inside an aircraft there is little room for a fire engine.
Thats the end of my first sojourn in Saudi Arabia.
I hope that you have enjoyed these tales.

John Morgan

05/01/2004

Epilogue?

That was the last of my Saudi stuff that reflected the events during my first contract in the desert kingdom. I did have two more contracts there later, but neither were anywhere as interesting, in fact they were positively boring to the extreme. I did meet some nice people during the three conracts but, so many were of such relatively short aquaintance that I have forgotten much about them. As far as incident went, I suppose in the three years of my next two contracts there were hardly any things happened that would be suitably interesting enough to commit to paper anyway.
My second contract, the one where I came across one of those Condors I told about, was out in the central highlands of the kingdom, at a place called Gassim airport, Gassim was the region, roughly equivalent to a 'county' here in the UK. There, I was in charge, under a general manager, of the whole maintenance operations at the airport, I was responsible for the daily schedule of maintenace and such with a total of some 150 workers in all trade skills, they were, in the main, Thailanders, a problematic crowd, as quite often their main evening entertainment was gambling. As you may imagine that presented many problems due to the quite violent arguments that they got involved in over debts to one another and accusations of cheating etc. One guy we had to deal with, it transpired, was already a convicted killer back home in Thailand, again over gambling problems. I had to keep a very close eye on the daily situation in that respect as well as attend to the duties I was contracted to manage.
These chaps were generally non muslim, but a few were, these I had little trouble with. Nor did the rest cause much strife being mostly muslims from Pakistan, India and a few Indonesians.
Overall there were a few little incidents, but nothing compared to Jedda. My most serious situation arose when half the airport suddenly lost all power. It came about because a worker had sliced the insulation on a large underground power cable, moisture, probably dew, had got into the inner part of the cable and as power flowed the water had heated up to steam, which in turn melted the inner insulation, resulting in a massive short circuit. I had to get out of bed at midnight to try to resolve the problem as nobody else, especially the Pakistani electrician, had the slightest idea what to do. On a nearby construction site I had noted a large drum of 150mcm cable lying unused near to the fence, so getting the authority of the airport director, I aquired this drum by taking our large wheeled forklift truck, breaking through the fence and 'stealing' the drum. I isolated the part of the system that had gone down and strung this cable from beyond the burnt out section along the edge of the airport roadway, and into the nearest beraker box that the cable would reach, I terminated the cable at both ends to bolt these terminals to the respctive breaker terminals. It gave me a small amount of power, at least to power up the lighting circuits.This was the most important problem solved as far as the director was concerned. Main power was re established the next day whilst I was in my bed sleeping off the stresses of the nights activities.
My last contract was in Riyadh, a city, potentially of great beauty. Right out in the dead centre of the Kingdom and the home base of the original King when the kingdom was created in the early part of the 20th century.
I was there based at the new airport, but for the two year period I was there I was working in with some Brits who were totally incompetant, not being technically skilled in the positions they held, During the first few months there the Gulf war occured and as we were attached to the cargo handling section of the airport facilities, the war virtually stopped all cargo flights, except for a few military incomers. The war lasted 15 or so days, the effects on us, over 9 months.One period there were some flights bringing in Patriot missiles and some bringing in cattle, but beyond that it was totally boring, and quite frustrating as the senior staff had little idea as to how the maintenance should be organised and run. It was something on the lines of a kids football game, one kicks the ball, and the rest run after it, and if you scored a goal, well done. After Gassim where I had control, and Jedda where I had freedom, Riyadh was really a waste of my time, and I don't doubt they would have said a waste of theirs also.

I was very glad to return home from that mis adventure.

So there you have it,

THE END.

05/01/2004

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