Category: Other stuff

Local Justice, Bulgarian Style

It’s Bloody Grim

By the start of 1995, I’d been working as a geologist for Rio Tinto *boo hiss* in Turkey for about 18 months. I was unhappy with the terms of my employment -which were rubbish- and to top it off, Rio decided that year to “localise” a lot of expat contracts. This meant slashing salaries and generally being dicks to anyone who wasn’t a full-time expat employee under an existing contract. Hence, I was feeling less than 100% devoted to them.

And then the cavalry arrived. Some drinking buddies who ran Anglo American’s Turkish office *Yay! Huzzah!* offered me a job in Bulgaria. The offer was substantially higher than my my pitiful Rio salary, so after a quick nose scratch and some judicious chin rubbing -it would’ve been impolite to say yes immediately- I signed the contract and enjoyed a jolly nice dinner with my new boss Owen and his wife. A few weeks later I was across the border in Sofia, renting a grotty communist-era 3rd floor apartment. It was tastefully decorated, painted Moscow-approved peppermint green, offset by bright orange tiles in the bathroom.

Anglo’s eastern European team, mid 1990s. Many of these people no longer have hair. I do.

Post-communism Sofia was grim. It was grey and shabby, full of miserable people who’s social system had collapsed. There was no produce in the shops in the winter and only a handful of semi-decent pubs and restaurants to take the edge off the cold grimness. The gorillas of organised crime were everywhere; muscle-bound pricks in black leather jackets and heavy gold necklaces, driving shiny new western sports cars in a city full of ratty Trabbies.

Sweaty Geologists

Late that summer, our small team headed to the southwest of the country close to the borders with Greece and Macedonia to explore for sediment-hosted gold. We rented a house in the town of Ognyanovo, owned by the local mayor. An interesting character in the Borat style, he would show up at odd times in the evening with a couple of local prostitutes in tow who were offered to us gratis. His treat. There were regular heated but polite discussions between him and my Bulgarian colleagues as we declined the entertainment, but I will admit we were more than happy to accept his home-made slivovitz (plum schnapps.)

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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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Scary Creatures

ooer…

One of the joys of a career in geology is the opportunity it affords humble earth scientists to get closer to nature, David Attenborough style. Sometimes a bit too close. Here are a few stories on the nastier strains of wildlife that I’ve encountered myself, or stories that friends have told me. I’ve covered some already –tortoises, ostriches, polar bears etc.– so they won’t be rehashed here.

This list is NOT a top ten and it’s not arranged by level of threat or ability to cause painful death or injury. It’s simply a list of stuff that occurred to me after my mother-in-law (thanks Maureen) planted the idea for the post. If you have your own story, let me know via the comments.

Hairy Insect Things With Lots of Legs

Best avoided.

In the field, anything with lots of hair, a bulbous pink abdomen and more than 4 legs should be studiously avoided, which is why I’d never vote for Boris Johnson.

If you ask me, the single worst insect nightmare is the camel spider, not actually a spider and not really a scorpion either. I touched on them in an earlier blog post. Giant sandy coloured fuckers with huge jaws, they lurk all over Africa and the Middle East, lying in wait to scare the shit out of arachnophobic people like me.

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The Heart of The Matter

Adventures with A Fib

It’s been a few months since I published anything on my motley blog. I’ve been distracted by on going health issues that bullied their way into the tranquility of the Urbancrows e-rookery.

Almost one year ago, I walked into my doctor’s surgery with a sinus infection and came out with a heart problem. It was a Friday toward the end of October, and I was definitely not a happy camper. I was sweating. My skin was an attractive shade of corpse grey, and I was breathing hard -all of which I put down to the rivers of goop coming out of my sinuses, wending their merry way to my lungs.

Cough please.

My doctor, who’s Russian, was listening to my chest to see if the sinus infection had spread to my lungs. She took a listen with the stethoscope, then listened again all the while looking more and more worried. The cold end of the stethoscope was moving rapidly across my back as I breathed in an out, accompanied by the ominous sound of anxious tutting. Bloody hell, I thought, my lungs must be bad -my head flooded with images of a murky swamp full of mucus and bacteria.  She sat up, took a long look at my pallid, sweaty face and muttered:

“Listen to me carefully. You must go to hospital right now.”

The sinus infection was obviously worse than I thought.

“Isn’t hospital a bit drastic? Can’t you just give me some antibiotics? Last time I had an infection you gave me Amoxicillin.” I said, coughing and hacking and sweating a bit more for good measure.

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The Cherry Orchard

Every so often, I’ve been privileged to visit a project that is SO woeful that I’ve started to think mid-tour that there must be a hidden upside; something I’ve missed that everyone else can see. This one such story.

Thanks go to my colleague Polar Bear Dave for filling in the blanks and sending me his pictures from the trip.

“A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.”

Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Every so often, I’ve been privileged to visit a project that is SO woeful that I’ve started to think mid-tour that there must be a hidden upside; something I’ve missed that everyone else can see. A trip to Morocco years back springs to mind. We were there to visit a VMS project which wasn’t. It was a small, shear zone hosted base-metal occurrence. About 600 stream sediment samples had been collected in a 10x10km concession(!) looking for more “VMS” occurrences; enough geochemistry to spot a discarded AA battery 3 miles upstream, despite the total lack of hydrothermal alteration in the country rock.

“In 20 years I’m going to a crap project in Wenatchee..ha ha ha ha etc.”

I mentioned another travesty in my last post A Few Thoughts About Optimism in Exploration. This one was blind optimism on such a grand scale that I was actually in awe of the guys showing us around. The total lack of common sense was exceeded only by the hopelessness of the project. When it was over, my colleague Dave and I drove back to Vancouver alternately stunned into total silence or engulfed in hysterical laughter at what we’d just witnessed, checking our notes to make sure it was real.

Zombies Ate My Brain!

We’d done an office review of hundreds of zombie juniors on the Venture Exchange; companies with no cash that may have had a stalled project in need of funding. The work flagged a gold project in an old mine near Wenatchee in Washington; the self-proclaimed Apple Capital of the World by the locals, who’ve obviously never been to Kent in southeast England where I grew up.

Wenatchee. It’s the apple capital of Wenatchee.
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My Wartime Roots

My maternal ancestors were ethnic Germans, deported from Czechoslovakia in 1946. This is my mother’s story.

In a departure from the usual mining-related sarcastic drivel, here is a short story about my mother’s dim and distant origins -and hence mine too- which are rooted in one of the key historical events of the 20th Century; the onset of World War 2. Anyone raised in Europe, with parents or grandparents in their 80s who are still alive, has a link to the war because directly or indirectly, it affected everybody on the continent.

The Catholic church in Graslitz where most of my ancestors live today.

I should note that this is a very superficial backward glance at a critical period in European history. I deliberately make no judgements on the horrific events of that period -my aim in writing this down was simply to document the family’s experiences for my 2 sons while I still have access to real memories from the time. To be fair, my mum was very small – only 6 when the war ended and 7 when the family was deported- so the stories are patchy and remembered through the eyes of a child but enriched with details gleaned from her parents and historical archives available on the internet.

Out Of Graslitz / Kraslice

For most of my adult life I’ve been aware that my mother’s roots are German-Czech, and that the family ended up in Germany in 1946 but some of the detail was lacking (for me at least.) She was born in 1939, a tiny hamlet called Silberbach on the outskirts of a small town called Graslitz in the far west of Czechoslovakia, 5km from the German border. Now known as Kraslice, it’s nestled in wooded hills and valleys; the town name may derive from the medieval German word “Graz”, a pine forest, which fits the countryside, but it may also mean small castle. The family were affluent ethnic Germans, with a thriving business making lace and musical instruments.

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Kevin And The Ostrich Of Death.

Full credit to Kevin Broomberg for writing this down, sending it to me, giving me permission to publish it, and putting up with my simplistic edits.

When I grow up I want to be an ostrich.

Here in the urbancrows e-rookery we get a lot of comments about the blog. Granted most are spam bots, or messages from lonely ladies in Russia offering me pictures of themselves au naturale if I just click on a link (which is very nice of them), but every now and then something I write attracts real comments from what I believe are real people. Strangely, I got the most comments after I published the “Field Dump” story, which either 1) tells us something about the human obsession with the act of coiling a rope, or 2) highlights a worryingly low level of maturity in geologists’ humour. Or perhaps both.

To date, I hadn’t received a comment that was compelling enough to make me want to publish it as a full post. They’re mostly short anecdotes, or nice feedback that might add texture to a story, but they lack sufficient detail to make the cut.

That changed the other day thanks to my new mate Kevin Broomberg in South Africa. Kevin’s note pushed all the right buttons for me. He spun me a tale about what happened to him and a few colleagues when they met a rather ornery 8ft tall death chicken. The ripping yarn included dangerous wildlife with nasty big claws, misplaced avian sexual desire, and a remote field camp -how could I not publish it? The only thing missing was zombies (which I wasn’t able to write in to the tale, try as I might.)

Full Patch Death Chickens looking for trouble.

So, with his permission, a few of his photos and a bit of editing, here’s his true story about a randy ostrich that made life very difficult for Kevin and his crew. Full credit to Kevin for this piece. I’ve done some editing but it’s 99% his work. Sadly, he tells me all the photos he had of this poultry incident (sorry) were fried in a shipping container which baked in the sun for 4 weeks during a move from Dar es Salaam to Johannesburg so we’re having to make do with whatever pictures we could find.

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A Crow Update

There’s Been A Death In The Family

The name of this blog is Urban Crows; a name I picked for its obvious links to earth science. Ha ha.

Three years ago, as a distraction from work, I started blogging purely for my own enjoyment. Could I write? Did I have the discipline to write regularly? Could I write anything remotely engaging that anyone would read other than my mum?

I had the naive goal of churning out lots of fascinating essays about the crows that visit my urban back yard, pushing back the frontiers of corvid behavioural science along the way. What a compelling subject, thought I.

One of my urban crows. I call it Blackie

But despite my best efforts to keep the blog a geology-free zone, it was hijacked, tied up and unceremoniously thrown head first back into the familiar world of mining and exploration by a couple of pieces on the industry. Much to my amazement, the mining stuff gained me a lot of subscribers, so the crows were quickly banished back to the roost. Know your audience is a key rule; go where the readers are. So be it. From then on I wrote about mining and geology with the odd piece on my musical diversions.

Crow Poo

Having said that, it’s well past time for a crow update. Things have moved on. Crows have come and gone -although they’re all black, the same size and sound the same so I can’t really be sure that this statement holds water- but more recently a slow moving tragedy has played itself out on my garage roof.

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Please pass the salt.

They Thought They’d Get Away With It.

Names, dates, locations have been excised from this story to protect anyone who needs protecting -yes, even the guilty parties. People and companies have come and gone since it happened, but other than that, it’s a true tail of mineral malfeasance. This piece would have failed miserably without the crucial input from 2 good industry friends. They know who they are. A big thank you to both of you.

“When markets are hot, scoundrels come out of the woodwork.” Northern Miner, June 1996

For every major gold discovery, there are dozens of failed projects. The exploration business is actually very adept at not finding viable mineral deposits. Most projects fail for want of enough tons to make an economic mine. Some may be big, but they lack the metal grade needed to justify extraction. Others fail because of local politics or remoteness. But a few, a special few, fail because they were never real in the first place. They were simply fictions created by crooked management or a scoundrel out to make a quick buck.

Field geologists actively failing to find anything in Yemen, 1990s.

The history of mining is littered with scams. The ones that happened a hundred years ago have become mining lore, acquiring a patina of wild west romanticism with time. Back then, it was a world of snake oil salesmen – Mark Twain’s liar in a hole snaring unsuspecting patsies. Fast forward to the present day, and we rightly regard more recent deceptions as criminal and decidedly unromantic. It’s worse living in Vancouver, because we – or maybe someone we know- could well have a direct personal connection with the perpetrator(s); junior mining is a small world with few places to hide if you’re found out.

Continue reading “Please pass the salt.”

And A Big Thank You..

To everyone who’s ever read anything on the Urbancrows blog. Sometime last week, the blog sailed past 50,000 hits: not readers, hits -so some are return users (why, oh why, would you come back…?) but either way, I’m a happy camper.

What he said.

I can’t thank anyone who’s ever read a piece of mine enough for making urbancrows successful beyond anything I could have imagined when I started it. My main aim when I kicked off was to record a few career stories for my kids, post some dumb opinions, and give vent to my sarcastic Englishman side while improving my writing at the expense of my reader’s rapidly eroding patience.

I succeeded with 2 of these objectives: my kids are yet to read a single story but I’ve definitely posted some pretty dumb, sarcastic pieces. Ho hum.

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