Rudy Yuan’s Streak oF BluE

This is my second time traveling for job in East Kalimantan.

Okay. This rig is different from the last time I came to work at. Friends have told me that this was the best rig of the four we were working with in onshore East Kalimantan. Well, that’s partly true.

The Apexindo-9 Rig

What I like:

Nice food! I got to choose the menu I want, and some of them were even western. Where on earth could I get T-bone steak (well, I’m not comparing offshore rig of course), roasted chicken, beef, bacon, etc. Errr, for you who are not fond of western foods, yes, there is Indomie and Supermie too.

Spacious sleeping room. It’s not like I was gonna roll myself in the room, or try strange positions that take up lotsa space (like V position, a three-way, or helicopter {oh gosh this style is totally a freak one}), but spacious room surely gives better mood and provides easier maneuver when there are more than one people in the same room, so we don’t have to deal with unnecessary glancing each other while one might be stripping to almost naked before changing or going into the bathroom. And at least I could stretch my whole body length to exercise push up (muscles have been shrinking lately, gotta work it up.. sigh)

What I don’t like:

ONE: Damn MUDDY MUD soil! This was south Sumatra all over (the site was thankfully clean and tidy, but the road was worse). The soil was sticky as shit (literally shit). It rained a lot lately. And cars and trucks alike got stuck at many places of the road (they eventually blocked up the whole road and we had to reroute or wait. Poor cars with no 4-wheel drive and heavy trucks were the worse victims of getting stuck). And it made walking harder (the mud stuck on the boots and dragged at it, made it heavier), and working harder still. What fun part of this was as we sometimes successfully passed by a stuck car or truck, we could throw a smug smile at them and laughed inwardly. hihi.

push push push (wahaha, poor u)

TWO: Damn HEAT. Oooh our position is at 0.something degree latitude. The equator is right a few kilometers away. The sun was burning right above your hair and I could feel the heat raising smokes from the tip of all my hairs. And yes, I’m exaggerating it.

THREE: Damn mosquito! The rig was located right next to some kind of swamp invested heavily with Nipah (a kind of short palm tree), bushes, and bushes, and bushes. Low not-ever-flowing water settled on the impermeable clay basins filled with filth and god-knows-how-long-they-have-been-there dirt, silt, shit, and shit and shit (that’s too many shits for u), which was a fertile breeding habitat for mosquitoes! Okay, I’m exaggerating the shit thing.

And funny it is that the mosquitoes had their own meal time. We would notice none a mosquito anywhere at around half to six o’clock. But at six o’clock, HUNDREDS of them were already swarming around, buzzing near our exposed flesh, ready to suck. And by hundreds I’m not kidding at all. They were so many I regretted not bringing the electric mosquito killer. You know, the one that shapes like a racket and gives off sparks whenever an insect got caught in its metal net. I would swing it at them and I’d be sure it’d catch a whole net full of mosquitoes! How satisfying that would be! Letting them get fried with the painful electric shock. And the crackling sound of the sparks. And the burnt-like-in-hell smell. Oh geez, they’re so annoying we had to stop working with our tool outside. By seven o’clock, they had reduced to half by number. By eight o’clock, they were just a couple of them left, diminishing to probably late-to-wake-up hunters.

And some of them were pretty hungry, damn damn hungry. Once they snapped their sucky needle inside your flesh and drew their feast of blood, they were like going “don’t care if it was doomsday”. They wouldn’t even notice my finger coming until my eager-to-kill-and-crush finger pressed at their feeble bodies with all hatred I could muster. And still there were another hundreds flying around your face and neck trying to find an open spot. And my satisfaction of killing the stupid one would vanish quickly. Arrh.

FOUR: Damn small bathroom. All space was only for a sitting-toilet, and a shower room, and nothing more! That’s all the bathroom was. There wasn’t even enough room to stretch out both hands, let alone spurting sperm around (aka self-service)!

FIVE: Stupid English! ;P Okay okay, I know my English is not perfect either, but it’s my right to laugh at others’ mistakes while I still can, right? Look at this sign erected near our sleeping trailers.

Oh I give up on my imagination just to think what ‘personal sleeping’ meant. All I could think of was the opposite of the adjective, which is ‘public’ sleeping.  AND I wonder where and how they do the ‘public’ sleeping (public sleeping might mean orgy, no?? I want a NOT personal sleeping then! :D).

It is supposed to tell people to keep voices low since people are sleeping. The writer might have wanted to write Personnel sleeping…

But all bad things aside, I pretty like this place. Job was much easier than even in Salak or Seram. We could go to nearby town (which was some 10 km away) to stock for snacks. Though I had to rely on my Telkomsel Flash for internet connection (which was pretty slow since I only got gprs signal), at least I still could chat with some dearest friends and downloaded porn biology articles about reproduction system (so slowly I couldn’t stand the torture coming from my groin butt brain).

And I got to see Bekantan in the wild. Do you know what Bekantan is?? I didn’t! It came out from the bushes to cross the road when we were on our way to the rig. It was squatting, so I had no idea how tall it actually was. Its hair was mostly white, with black streak near its legs and butt area. I didn’t see its face clearly. It dashed so quick as our car went up close.

I yelped, “Hey, it’s monkey! Monkey!” (typical metro city boys who’s never been to the wild before).The driver said, “no, that’s not just typical monkey, that’s Bekantan”. And I foolishly asked back “what is Bekantan?” (it’s foolish because it was clearly a variation of monkey and my question showed how uneducated I was). He condescendingly replied (well, he is not condescending, I just feel being condescended with my own ignorance), “That is the monkey they use for Dufan logo” (is that true?? I truly have no idea if that is Bekantan. And imagining the logo, I’m reminded of a friend of mine who looked like it.. lol). WHAAT, I thought? This driver who seldom went to Jakarta (he stayed in Balikpapan) knew the Dufan monkey and I did not?? I almost blurted out “Mas, have you ever heard about Maxwell’s Law for Electromagnetic Field?” (just to let him know I was not stupid and made him feel stupid instead. Well it would just make me look worse. A clever man is humble. Since I am humble not to ask back, that concludes I am ______ [if you couldn't fill the blank yourself, consider getting into School for Special Needs aka School for dumbs. *BIG GRIN*])

And talk about monkey, I saw monkeys everywhere here; the usual monkey, the small brown ones. Their favorite hangout place was near the garbage dump. I saw one sitting idly eating monkey-knows-what food. One even came as close as our trailer and I saw it digging through our dump box. It ran away as soon as I got near. Well, I just acted normal and cool since monkey was not my type of animal to do xxx with anyway, so there was no need for me to get agitated, right. WTH. Oh one Bapak even fed them sometimes with bread.

monkey meal time...?

Not only mokey it was soon revealed that liked garbage dump. We encountered Biawak quite several times too. (I searched Wiki, it’s called Monitor Lizard or Goanna in English). This one was just coming out from a garbage dump, crawled pretty quickly across the mud, and headed towards the bushes. I quickly asked the driver to stop and it stopped too. This one was rather small though.

We saw another one a little bit bigger. If not seen carefully, it looked in many ways like crocodile.

Oh oh, I did a stupid thing this morning. So while I took some shots to be used for this blog, I went across a small drainage to get into a higher landing at the opposite. When I tried to get back down, I noticed a almost dry raised surface of the drainage and jumped upon it. Stupid me! It was sand, and it was wet, and it had surely been a sedimentary deposit of the water flow, and it was not compact at all. My foot sank instantly into the sand, burying my feet up to the knee. Darn, I almost shouted, “Mamaaaaaa” or maybe “Ya Tuhan ampuni aku” or maybe “Oh shit, I might have wet my underwear!!”. ALMOST. I did not shout.

You know what the first thing I did once I managed to pull my foot out of it? I looked around trying to search whether there had been anybody watching me. It would be damn humiliating if there had been. I need to keep my cool rite!!

And this was the second time spending Christmas at rig! At least they put decorated a Christmas tree in the galley. MERRY CHRISTMAS everybody.

back WHAAAT???

I love my job! (This statement has just made me as an inconsistent man after before I had had complaints with how my job had mutilated many pleasures of life [like visiting a library, orphanage, museums, charity, AND including breast massage, night life and drunk life, and kinky sex])

This time my job had brought me to a place called Gunung Salak. For you whose geographical knowledge is poorer than an elementary-grade imbecile (I just can’t stop mocking people, can I. I myself actually had just found out where it was a couple of days ago… LOL), Gn. Salak is located south of and near the city of Bogor. It is quite well known as camping site, the place where a military aircraft had crashed and disappeared some time ago (I have no idea whether it has been found or not…), and the source of Aqua mineral drinking water (I indeed saw a child drank from a pipe jutting out of the ground, so I bet it was save..? Aqua used 7-step hydro pro system nevertheless, stop worrying.. :P).

As the name implies, the site is located on one of the mountainous terrains of this area. Parts, where human civilization has not laid its hand upon, are still covered with stands of trees and thick grows of bushes, and greenness covered most of the land, save for the majestic bright blue ruling up over the sky.

Our working site was contained inside a compound which the company we served (it was actually one of the biggest oil and gas company in the world) had built on top of one of the hilly regions. It was vast and comprising several scattered drill-sites, a campsite, and asphalt road, among many other facilities I don’t know.

I departed at 5 at dawn (I was texted message thrice by my coordinator to NOT BE LATE at the appointed 4 o’clock, but it turned out that I was the only most foolish punctual boy to come before 4 and found out that they usually went at 5 anyway. [Appointment still stretches like rubber here in our country, perhaps because we're still the top two producer of natural rubber?] So I used the remaining waiting time to think about fate, love, and destiny… BAH, NO! I SLEPT in the reception room…).

The day before, I had been in leisure walking around the mall with P with the knowledge embedded inside my head by my coordinator’s words the week before that I probably wouldn’t need to go to the rig in the coming weeks. The call, however, came later that afternoon, when P and I were looking at shoes in Charles & Keith. It quickly gave many problems to my plans of the day and of the week I had prepared inside my head, but it surely definitely didn’t stop us from completing our perquisite mission to finish our shopping and mall-trotting (P did all the shopping. The only penny I spent was for a lunch meal at Bakerzin. I should be given award for being able to not shop!). After I got home, though, I still had to pack, prepare a package needed to be sent to someone, take a bath, buy dinner, and browse the internet (surely… I need to check on my porn account to continue the subscription my Facebook account). Thus how I ended with not enough sleep.

The journey took 3 hours or less. I planned to sleep in the car but alas, one of the two companion engineers was a well-known mischievous comedian. The first one third of the journey was spent for jokes and chat, the second luckily for a short nap, and, as the road became more hellish in turns and swirls combined excellently with a driver with the great skill of the Singaporean bus drivers (it’s really truly bad, despite its famed recognition for great tourism! I know Indonesians’ are not much better, but surely traffic is different in both countries), the last third part was horrifyingly for keeping our body still from swaying too much and struggling to contain whatever resided inside our stomach from getting back out through our mouth. Some part of the road formed 180 degree sharp turn and sometimes also elevated at the same time. The drive was worst than Dufan’s roller coaster (piece of kitten shit) and Kora-Kora (nooo, no, no, no, no, kora-kora is STILL the worst ride EVER).

The road inside the guarded compound is pretty much the same. For environmental awareness, the company had preserved as much nature as they could. The road and site were bounded by green leaves of mountain’s rain forest.

from the tea plantation near a well site... somewhere outside the main compound though

Snakes were seen sometimes crossing the street (apparently, it’s not just the chicken which crosses the street here. Ask why!?). And there was even a plank showing a warning that wild beasts might cross the road (and it showed the picture of a jaguar… seriously… there’s no jaguar in Java right? some stupid zoologist might have made the plank…)

The food is definitely much much much much better than the ones in South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, and Seram Island; last places I had visited for work. The day I arrived, I had slices of beef with barbeque sauce, which I never got at any other rigs. Salad was present, and the cool drink dispenser was filled all the time. Hot water never ceased to exist. It was heaven to rig workers (in Indonesia…).

The lodging is average but much cleaner and the staff more helpful and friendly. And we got our own share of blanket. The last time in Seram, I had to rely on my thin bedsheet to protect me from getting frozen to death. I would have been, if I had not been so ‘hot’. The camp was more organized too. They even put two layers of security posts (total of three layers if you count the one before we get into the compound) to ensure our safety (from what exactly, I don’t know).

But what I like the most was the weather. It was cool most of the time. Fog (and often a thick one) and thin sheet or heavy shower of rain were common. Air was super clear, clean, and crisp. And it made me sleepy all the time! (You know how much I love to sleep and how I always love the place that encourages me to. haha).

At places on the site, the view was breathtakingly beautiful.

To see the (distant) mountains with seamless spots of every hue of green from certain elevation and angle, I couldn’t help but feel like it was so intimidating that I could be easily swallowed by its vastness.

My awe, though, came surprisingly from another matter. One night, when all of us were asleep in the camp (I shared the trailer with three other companions), I was roused awake by something. It was 3 in the morning, as I checked my cell, and I wondered what had made me awake (certainly it’s not a wet dream, or a hard-on). Not seconds later, I found the reason as I smelled something funny.

FART!

Oh gosh, have anyone told you that fart contains H₂S (Hydrogen Sulfide) that is a hazardous poisonous substance when inhaled? In certain drilling site, there is even H2S-safety company that will monitor H2S occurrences. When inhaled in certain ppm (I have to explain ppm?? It’s short for parts per million. Go back to Elementary School for Disabled Kids, they might teach you there…), H2S can cause unconsciousness and quick death afterwards as they attack the respiratory system. But of course, fart does not contain that much H2S to be able to kill. When H2S is presence in very low level, it has the smell of rotten egg (like your fart!), which means it is not dangerous. At killing amount, H2S will have no smell at all as it has killed your sense of smelling already.

Anyway, farting is so common here that everybody does it publicly and unashamedly (well, not all “everybody”, but all my shameless companions…). The cold weather surely brings certain character to the workings of our digestive system, but I know everybody likes to fart whether stealthily or not, without caring for the consequences of irritating others’ noses. Well, my advice is, for you fart-bastard, just don’t fart in front of prominent or ‘dangerous’ people, like the president (like you would see him ever), your grandparents (except your grandparents like to joke about farts or their noses are so useless they can’t differentiate poo and poodding!), the police officers (who would be stupid enough to even fart at the traffic officer if one don’t want to end up losing money or whatever pride they might be stripped off by the officer), military officers (especially when they are carrying their guns or grenades or knife or even nothing! they might fire you ‘right’ in the hole), and so on, and I guess you’ll be excused. It is healthy, anyway.

Oops, HEAR THAT, I just farted. humm, smell niiiice.

If not for the muddy ground at the rig site and the narrow placement of our unit, I would have deemed this place perfect (everything was crammed as they tried to fit everything in the small site. Never before I had to climb over thick pipes, walk over mud disposal, and maneuver through a well head to get into my unit. And never before my unit was placed so isolated from the rig that we would have depleted our energy by the time we heaved our tool from the unit to the rig floor. And never before the surrounding was so noisy I couldn’t enjoy JASON MRAZ from my JBL speaker!).

AND if not for the part where I was awaken by FART, I would have loved all my time here… Nope, I love this place anyway (sooo inconsistent of me huh??)