ok, here are some pix

i was talking to emma and she said that when she asked to see pix of algeria, she didn’t mean pix of every camel i see (i saw more today, YEA!). so here are going to be a load of pix. i have more, but these are kind of a good start.

when i flew into algeria from gatwick, all i saw was sand and smoke. the smoke worried me a bit. the alarmist part of my brain was wondering what the hell i had gotten myself into. all i could see in my head was the oil fires in kuwait when iraq retreated, oh so many years ago. i figured they were burnt out cars, and there was lots of tribal fighting or something going on. i was a little apprehensive to land, despite that i’d heard such good things about hassi messaoud from the people on the flight (it was a charter for oil&gas personnel like NP, schlumberger (pronounced ‘shlum ber ZHAY’), and halliburton). i found the reason for the smoke as you can see.



here is a better view of the plants. they vent excess gas to a flare (what a waste of resources) when the compressors aren’t running


here’s a bunch of sand from the sahara and still more smoke on my 1.5 hour jaunt from hassi to the zotti camp


this is my room from just inside the front door


this is my “house”, hah. there are two separate rooms per trailer (our bathrooms and sink share a wall


this is my street (not really a street, just going with the analogy). street F, house 13


this is how we get hot water. it's a big balloon-type thing that sits here all day, baking in the north african sun and then gets pumped to our rooms. apparently, similar devices were used for fuel and water in vietnam


for emma… this is an african sunset, i’ll try to get a better one


this is a cool smoke ring about 45 feet across that one of the exhaust stacks burped out


AND… my lucky algerian steelers fan. we haven’t lost since i’ve been in algeria, maybe it’s because of this guy

hope you liked, kids. i’ll try to get more later.