Month: January 2022

War Graves Along The Wire Road.

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) might recall a few stories about my time in western Pakistan in the late 1990s. It was bloody amazing; rough country but an extraordinary experience, except for the nasty gut bug I caught which followed me back to Budapest and then set about exhausting the local toilet paper supply.

Would I go back there? No. It’s even more nuts today than the 1990s and back then it was bloody weird, with drug runners, Taliban incursions, nuclear tests and the odd hotel bombing thrown in for good measure.

I prospected for copper on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan; the long, straight east-west stretch in northern Balochistan. It’s an arbitrary frontier created in 1893 in the depths of the Great Game between Britain and Russia, pencilled in on a map of the subcontinent by one Sir Henry Mortimer Durand GCMG, KCSI, KCIE, PC.

Sir Henry & Abdur Rahman getting ready to draw lines on a map.

Sir Mortimer Pencil Line

Sir Mortimer served as the Foreign Secretary of India from 1884 to 1894. He was a stuffy looking British civil servant in the best up-tight Victorian tradition and about as pro-Empire as you could get. His pencil line legacy -originally known as the Durand line- ran for 1,660 miles, cutting through traditional tribal territories and largely ignoring the wishes of the local savages. Its intent was to demarcate the areas of political influence between the British in India and one Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Iron Emir; the man who finally united Afghanistan’s warring tribes. The line still exists although it’s now the modern border between the 2 countries and it still ignores the traditional tribal territories.

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Never Judge A Book

God, I Feel Old.

This is the second of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers. See also Arms and the Man.

I’ve finally admitted an awful truth to myself; it’s 40 years since I left high school. In my head, I’m still a spotty 17-year-old idiot, albeit one who’s wondering why he suddenly has moobs, grey hair and a large, malignant bum growth called a mortgage. Give or take the odd break for post graduate studies, I’m now 37 years into my earth science career; 37 wonderful, peripatetic years of travel, strange alcoholic drinks, and disturbing intestinal nasties.

At Grammar School, I excelled in one thing and one thing only. Mediocrity. Sports? Too skinny and uncoordinated. Academics? Nah. I was a shit study and didn’t exactly thrive in the Hogwarts-style red brick school environment I was in; my exam results made the attainment of slightly-below-average-grades look like lofty ambition. Healthy living? Nope. I smoked from 14 years old, and me and my mates were in the pub as soon as we looked old enough and had sufficient moola to buy a pint and a bag of crisps. To paraphrase the great soccer player George Best, most of my money I spent on beer, ciggies and girlfriends and the rest I wasted.

Travel. And lots of strange alcoholic drinks.
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Arms & The Man

Or, how to interview a heavily armed geologist.

This is the first of 2 posts on the joys of interviewing & hiring geologists and engineers.

Recruiting geologists for a project is a tricky business. For all sorts of reasons, someone who comes across well in an interview can be an absolute antisocial nightmare in the field; hygiene issues, weird sexual proclivities (see Geologists Gone Bad), fucked up political or religious opinions, drugs… the list of transgressions is endless, but the end result is always the same; someone sitting alone in a corner of the cook house while everyone else plays cards and throws things at them.

A Yemeni market. Veggies not guns.

I’ve hired nose combers to work in Pakistan, Iran, and Bulgaria. The biggest success was a team of young Bulgarian geologists we hired in the mid-90s for Anglo American’s exploration office in Sofia. The 4 guys we picked have all forged decent careers in the international exploration industry. When we hired them, starting on maybe $250/month -good money in post-communist Bulgaria- they were thrilled to be working for a major mining company that wasn’t owned by a Russian oligarch. Each of the guys had a different skill set to add to our group -prospecting, logistics, drill program supervision and so on; a competent and adaptable project team that we used all over the world.

Yemen

A few years later I was back on the hiring trail again for the same company, this time working with a Turkish colleague, Yasar, to hire a small team of Yemeni geologists from the university in the capital city, Sana’a.

Continue reading “Arms & The Man”