.jpg "Reivilo Clouds") Order a print of this photo
I left Libya after nearly two years under a small cloud. We’d been busted by the police for brewing beer and it took a couple of extra weeks for our Mister Fixit to secure my ability to leave the country. By that time my return visa was out of date and my employers felt it would not be wise to pursue a renewal. So I worked at the head office south of London for a couple of months before picking up my next assignment, South Africa. (When the case finally wound through the legal system in Libya I reportedly received a five year sentence, suspended for five years.)
South Africa was a welcome change – green fields instead of sand and commercial beer instead of home-brew.
The party I joined was living in converted caravans (trailer RVs) and it was all pretty bush. When I arrived the crew was without a cook so we were a bunch of about 15 guys trying to cook for ourselves. As you might guess, our meals weren’t the healthiest at that time – lots of barbequed red meat and beer.
The first survey area I went to was in the North West Province. The crew was camped at Reivilo, a small town about 60 miles (100 km) southwest of Vryburg. The town was originally established in 1883 and renamed twice the last time after the Rev A.J. Olivier (Olivier reversed is Reivilo). At least, that’s according to this Wikipedia article.
As my faded memory recalls, pretty much every afternoon at around 3:00 pm, the clouds would build us and a series of thunder storms would roll through. The noise from the rain and thunder rendered our seismic recording an exercise in futility so we’d return to camp, and face the prospect of cooking once again.
In this photo, the sun is setting as the storms break up and start to clear out.
At least in South Africa I wasn’t confined to my Olympus XA, much as I loved it. Here I could take my Canon AE1 Program. Later I picked up a Canon A1 and by the time my assignment ended, two-and-a-half years later, I owned two Canon T90′s.
.jpg "Above Glenprosen") Order a print of this photo
Unless it’s a peak of known prominence, the only reason to hike up a hill is to see what’s on the other side. So having hiked up Glen Prosen, this was one of the views we were presented with.
For reasons I can now only guess at, I took this photo laying down. In the original, my boots are in the frame. Looking back 27 years, the view now looks better sans boots, so I cropped them out.
As I recall, this was a view to the east across the Angus Glens. I think the glen running through this image is Glen Clova.
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For the first several years of my seismic career, my schedule was ten weeks on, four weeks off. Initially I though this was great. The I did the math. I was just getting all my weekends bundled up together. For a very short while I felt I was getting swindled. After all, my buddies back home had weekends off and they got holidays too!
But then I realized they were only getting two weeks vacation each year while I would get over three four-week vacations each year. And it’s not as though there was anything else to do but work in the desert. Each year we’d try to book enough work to take off Christmas Day. But inevitably, come lunchtime, we’d all be catching up on maintenance tasks since we’d grown bored.
This shot was taken when I went to visit a college buddy who’d become a Reserve Warden for the RSPB – Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He was watching over the reserve at the Loch of Kinnordy, near Kirriemuir in Scotland. Kirriemuir is the birthplace of J.M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan.
A few miles north of Kirriemuir lies Glen Prosen, sometimes written as one word, Glenprosen.
On this trip my buddy had been tasked (by himself) to install some bird perches in the loch. We’d row out in a small row boat and then use a sledge hammer to hammer in the uprights for the perches. Once the uprights were in place we’d nail the crossbar for the perch. Since I couldn’t swim at this point in my life, sitting in a row boat being used as a platform for a sledge hammer swing fest was not the best idea I’d ever had. Still, it was apparent that the water was only about four feet deep so I would have been able to stand up had I fallen in. As it was, we got so much water in the boat I might just have well have waded in, except the boat gave us the height we needed to swing the hammer.
Having completed the task we decided to take a day off and hike around Glen Prosen. It was a glorious day and we left early in the morning for our hike, driving as far as the road went before continuing on by foot. In this image, my friend enjoys the view looking back along the glen, the trail we’ve ascended running down on the left.
The blue day pack is by Karrimor. I bought it in 1985 and it’s been around the world with me. My son, who turned 11 yesterday, uses it now when we camp with the Boy Scouts. It’s been one fantastic investment!
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So I thought I’d follow up on my post on the Ghadames city wall and the fields within the city walls with this image from inside one of the many covered passages.
Doorways and window openings are set in the whitewashed walls. Periodically there are gaps in the roof that allow the passages to breathe and let in light. Certainly at the time I was there, you’d see the occasional light bulb set in the ceiling, usually outside a doorway. This suggests, to me anyway, that the lighting was provided by the owner of the dwelling at that point, rather than municipal lighting.
The old city has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. According to this Wikipedia article, the old town was depopulated through the 1990s. If true, then I’m sure it will rapidly fall into disrepair. Sites like needs need continuous habitation to maintain them. My Ghadames photos were taken in 1986.
Below is a color version of this image.
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So yesterday’s photo was looking at old Ghadames from the outside in. Apart from the shadow of the palm tree there’s little to indicate the lush oasis within the city walls.
The city walls protected the oasis. Within the city, in addition to the network of passageways, there’s a network of water ditches (and now pipes) that conserve precious water better than open ditches. These water ditches serve a patchwork of small fields.
In this view some form of grain is being grown in this small field within the old city. In the corner there’s a hole at the base of the wall where a water ditch flows through.
In the field behind there are data palms and beyond that, another mosque. Like the passageways, the numerous plan trees provide shade to make moving around between the fields relatively pleasant also.
It must have been a relief to have been on a Trans-Saharan camel train arriving in Ghadames. The prospect of leaving on the next leg of the journey can’t have been nearly so pleasant.
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Old town Ghadames (Ghadamis? Ghudamis?) was really quite quaint back in the mid-eighties when I took this photo with my Olympus XA.
Rather than demolish and build over the old town, the Ghadafi regime built a new town to the south-west of the old town and the two co-exist. Ghadames is a camel’s spitting distance from the southern most point in neighboring Tunisia, however the blacktop road runs to the border crossing with Algeria.
Where new-town Ghadames has been built in the mechanized transport era, old town Ghadames traces it roots back to pre-Roman days. A desert oasis it was long a key way point on the Trans-Saharan trading routes.
The old town is still populated today. Even when I spent time there the traditional mud and lime buildings felt cooler that the newer air conditioned buildings. Indeed, some people owned property in both towns and sent the summer in the old town and the winter in the new town.
This photo was taken from just outside the old wall, near the water pool. The white tower and dome is part of one of the mosque complexes in the town – the white paint also serving to reduce the temperature on the inside. Just off frame to the right is one of the entrances to the old town.
If you enlarge the photo by clicking on it, you might notice that the dark shape near the center of the frame is actually a goat!
I visited Ghadames a number of times but took few photos. On this particular trip I was headed home so we’d driven in from the desert since our flight to Tripoli left in the late afternoon, we had a few hours to spend wandering around.
Like so many places I’ve visited, I’d love to go back and spend more time there making photographs but I don’t see that happening for this particular location.
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So this is how I remember huge chunks of the Libyan desert – seemingly endless rough gravel plains, extending as far as the eye can see in every direction.
What this photo actually shows is a stretch of the Libyan-Algerian border about 90 miles (140 km) south of Ghadames. Libya is on the left, Algeria is to the right, as if you couldn’t tell for yourself! The Land Rover serves to show the scale of the ‘gravel’.
If you had a reasonable imagination your could picture the landscape as rolling grasslands. When you did that, ancient stone-age art that some would see from time-to-time depicting lions, giraffes, antelope and other animals started to make sense. Personally, I never saw any but we had a sister crew working a further 250 miles south (east of Ghat) where they reported several findings.
The long wheelbase 109″ series 3 Land Rover was a true classic. It remained in production from 1971 through 1985! Although the Series III came standard with upholstered interiors on the doors, we used to specify the older, plain doors from the prior Series IIA. Less to go wrong so lower maintenance costs. One key to it’s off-road capability was the design decision to place the front wheels as close to the front of the vehicle as possible. For the longest time I thought only the British could fit a desert-bound vehicle with black plastic seats. Then one day when some locals stopped by in their Land Cruiser, I learned that the Japanese thought that was a good idea too. It wasn’t.
Our Land Rovers were not air conditioned. Air conditioners were also just extra, expensive, things to go wrong and our Land Rovers were under-powered as it was without an AC dragging off more horsepower. I recall one co-worker complaining about the lack of AC so the mechanics removed the top halves of the two doors!
One upside of being under-powered was it was difficult to go fast on the highway. I’m sure, particularly given my later experiences in South Africa, that we’d have had far more wrecks if we’d had more powerful engines. It also forced us to take the less adventurous routes in most cases, saving wear and tear on the vehicles also, not that we didn’t keep the mechanics fully employed!
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So am I obsessed with drilling? I think so. After all, I spent nearly five years in Libya of which three were spent working with these things on a daily basis. Looking back, those years in the Libyan desert were tremendous fun. At the time it may have seemed like the daily grind but I had terrific degrees of freedom to plan and execute my work and little in the way of soul-crushing micro-management. I also got to work with a terrific bunch of people from many different backgrounds and cultures.
Where my previous drilling photos were located near the center of Concession 20 and in the northern part, this one (I’m fairly sure from its sequence in my collection) is from the southern end of the concession. It’s another scan from a slide shot with my Olympus XA camera.
Here we see yet another variation on the Libyan landscape – the gravel plain. These were deceptive in being nowhere near as smooth as they appeared. Lines of dried water courses criss-crossed the plains at odd angles waiting to snare the Land Rover, and in odd cases, flip them!
Here you can see the tracks leading straight to the distant escarpment. The surveyors would head out first to lay the line. Then, usually, we’d follow with the drill rigs and then the recording crew would sweep by. By the time the recording crew came along, the tracks were well developed and clearly visible from the aircraft we used to use for crew rotations. The tracks then last for years!
Here the surface sand has long since blown away to form dunes elsewhere leaving a surface of heavier pebbles overlying a softer gravel. The lighter patches in the foreground here are most likely a gypsum formation, exposed at the surface.
The scrubby bushes show that moisture happens here, not that I recall it raining on this particular assignment. I do recall one day when it rained. That was the day we learned that the seams on the roof of our mess trailer had long since rotted away! It didn’t do the miles of recording cables and geophone strings we had laid out much good either. Fortunately the heat and the sun dried those out quickly once the rain had moved on.
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Yes, same location as yesterday, well a few hundred feet to the right, later in the day and a slightly different processing path.
I don’t recall what the dead growth is near the base of the palm tree but it’s clearly from many years in the past. Perhaps there was sand gathered around the base of this tree in the past but the sand has all blown away.
With the drill rig silent and the engine on my Land Rover turned off, all one could hear was the wind whistling over the surface of the rocks. On windless days there’d often be nothing to hear but the sound of your brain over-driving your ear drums to try and pick up the faintest vestige of sound. True silence – the absence of all sound – can be quite painful!
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by Richard Davis
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Why were you stuck with the Olympus XA in Lybia?
This was when I was in Libya in 1984-86. Shortly before I went someone from inside the Libyan embassy in London had shot and killed PC Yvonne Fletcher so relations were tense. The Libyan police and army were unpredictable at best and the advice from the Foreign office and from my employer was to avoid drawing attention to ones self. Hence the point-and-shoot.