Merry Christmas, from the Rig
Experience Outside!, The Travel Tagged christmas, engrish, mud, rig, the wild 1 Comment »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.
