Wu Hong
March 07 - As instructed, I took a taxi to the Upstream Venture Department building at 1:30pm. After people all gathered, a short brief and picture taken, we got on Aramco bus heading toward Aramco terminal. Looking at the attendances list, people were speculating we may have 3 ladies will join our trip once we arrive in Qasim. The Aramco airplane has two propeller/jet engines, it flies with load noise and yet quite stable. After one and half hours fly, we landed in Qasim, a small conservative town 90km to the northwest of Riyadh, with a brand new beautiful university. It took us more than 30 minutes in the VIP lounge to copy ID and passport documents for hotel registration. Once we got the room numbers, we were told to go straight to the bus. On the hotel bus, people just found out that our luggage were not with us. So, we rushed off the bus, back in the airport, to find the pilots (they are in the lounge ready to fly back to Dhahran in 2 hours), unlock the plane, unload the luggage. It was a huge chaos. I can only hope everything will get better from this point. Finally, we got to hotel 1 hour later. And it is a fantastic hotel in such a small town, without too many guests. The trip leader gathered us at the conference room to overview the geology we are suppose to see and passed some safety/security concerns we need to pay attention to. Every car will be equipped with mobile phone, walky-talky, and satellite phone. After a long meeting, we went for our dinner at 9:00pm.
March 08 - Our group of 20 sat in 5 Yukon 4x4's while 3 secret police cars, 1 in front, 1 at the end, 1 in the middle of our convoy headed out to the field. We checked out 15 outcrops. They are really typical geological outcrops with very impressive quality. We can also see the oil bearing formation outcrops. I picked up many beautiful fossils. During our trip, we got in trouble with some of the local authorities. Once that happened, there was always a car tinted in pitch black will show up from nowhere to ask the local guys to get lost. The only thing we were not happy about the secret polices was before our lunch; they raided our parked cars and consumed 4 of our lunch boxes while we were on foot to check out the outcrops. We had our lunch in a date tree farm. With the high-noon sun on top, the date trees really protected us from sunburn. During our lunch time we were trying to get more acquainted with each other. After individual introduction, we realized that the 3 expected ladies are actually 3 Italian guys with names as Paola, Luca, and Maria. The food at the hotel was so bad, the entire group decided to go to one of local Lebanese restaurant for change. Before we went out, we had to inform the secret police so that they will escort us outside the restaurant. The hotel prepared so much food for us tonight. They were surprised to find out none of us is showing up at their dinning hall. The 12-hour day trip exhausted everybody. And we still have 4 more days to go.
March 09 - Everything is getting in better order than the previous 2 days. Our last night dinner at the "Moon Over Lebanon" was terrible. Without choice, people were going to eat in the hotel again. On our way back from the field, our convoy passed over a brand new local police car on the freeway. Apparently, the police was upset and decided to cut in front of us and slowed the entire convoy down quite a bit. In about one minute, we started speeding up and left the police far behind us. I bet you can easily guess the secret polices had showed their secret again. Every time when we were out checking on the outcrops, they were remotely occupied the high points and hided behind the hills. They also controlled the road going in and out of our points of interest. This morning when I woke up, I found out that the secret polices also stayed in the rooms of the same floor. Among our group of 20, 6 are directly from Italy, 1 from France, 1 from Spain, 2 from Australia, 6 from Egypt, etc. Mark is an American geophysicist; he pees on every geological outcrop formation. He earned the name Mr. “Mark” Pee. We had made a big appearance in the local towns and attracted some attention. It is better to have the secret polices to keep us safe than sorry. We came back to hotel around 6pm. I went to the gym did one hour workout; the Italians were there doing workout, swimming, sauna, because the restaurant opened at 8:00pm.
March 10 - After several security incidences with the local authority, today everything regarding government formality was very smooth. Those 3 the secret police vehicles were still guarding us wherever we went. We checked out a site beyond a dumping yard. Just when we stepped out our cars, we found 2 complete petrified trees buried in the ground. Walking deeper inward, we found the ancient river channels, and there was a 20+ meter long petrified tree. Our field trip leader has been doing field geology in Saudi for 28 years. He talked to the ruling royal family to preserve many of the important precious geological sites. Some of the sites were fenced around, some left as is. It is very pitiful to see these treasures deteriorating. Tomorrow, we are moving to another town.
Comment from Yuan: After reading 4 of your reports, it dawned on me that this is not a vacation trip as I originally pictured. It appears that you are wandering into some potential dangerous ground with potential troubles and collisions with government official/police. I wish everything goes smoothly and return home without much your so called "interesting" incidence.
March 11 - We traveled 250km northwest to another town - Hail. Along our way there, we see the oil bearing formations disappearing. That is the main reason why Aramco drilled dry holes toward west and found most of the reservoirs in the eastern province. We saw police cars changing guard on the highway at the town border line when we traveled from town to town. Some times we felt over protected and became too obvious to the local people. Just when we finished visiting our last stop, one car’s tire was sliced open by the sharp rock. With 20 geologist/geophysicist/engineer, we can not get the spare tire out from the bottom of the car. After trying for one hour, the secret police drove to the nearby town to bring back a mechanic to do the job. The Italians were very interested in seeing how to change tire for the big car, because they are all driving small cars in Italy. Right before we entered Hail, the entire convoy was stopped at the checkpoint. All the white men were told to stay in the car. But everybody came out, because after 4-day sunburn, there was no white man at all. Within seconds, the secret police came to rescue again. And the reason they stopped us was the checkpoint police wanted to invite us for a cup of Arabian coffee, so we were told. At the outskirt of city Hail, there are huge mountain ranges. I saw 3 water falls coming down from the top. The scenery is outstanding in Saudi standard. Hail is actually a very prosperous town, business is booming (there is no oil here; I don’t know what causes the boom). We stayed in a 4-star hotel - Jabalah (Jabal means hill, Jabalah means twin hills). Only in the next morning everybody found out that it actually is a minus 4-star hotel. My room has no shower curtain (everybody's room has at least one thing not functioning, the trip leader’s room doesn’t even have soap), the phone doesn’t dial, the lighting all fail to work except the one in the bathroom, the blanket has strong Arabic smell I had to sleep fully dressed, I didn’t recognize any food but bread and boiled eggs in the restaurant which opened at 10pm. They wanted to send an engineer to fix my phone at 11pm. I immediately stopped them doing that; instead I went to the manager’s office to make the phone call and asked them to pay for the phone bill. This was a long night to kill.
March 12 - On the 6th day, we checked out more geological formations deep in the mountain range. We also went to an archeology site to see the ancient graffiti of giraffe, camel, hyena, and sacrifice platform. Of course, we saw graffiti with date in 2005 next to it. We headed back toward the airport via a different route, all the cars were getting lost in the desert even we have satellite phones, GPS, etc. Our trip leader Dr. Snalp, who spent 28 years doing field geology in Saudi, found the way out without GPS. He really made fun of us for this. We took the same Aramco 36-seater twin propeller airplane back to Damman Aramco terminal and got on the Aramco bus home while the Italians, French and Spanish were leaving from international terminal and Bahrain. During this trip I found Italian very hard working, French and Spanish very intelligent. We became very good friends of each other.
Comment from Yuan - Glad that you have completed the trip safely. No actual accident. Two questions:
1. I thought all the geo data in Saudi should have been well documented and checked out. Why do you still need to go to the field to check these data again?
2. Why is "of course we saw graffiti with date in 2005 next to it"?
Reply -
1) The sub-surface geology is never very clear anywhere in the world, Saudi is no exception. Although oil had been produced from underground for ~70 years here, any further detail study is crucial to change the model of the existing reservoirs. Hence, the oil reserve estimation/calculation can change accordingly based on our exploration results. You often heard some oil field reservoir has doubled/tripled after ONE single successful well was drilled and vise versa. That is why we are exploring and re-exploring.
2) "Of course" implies no matter how precious the archeology site is to us, you can still easily find modern day graffiti right next to it without too surprised. People are just not sensitive to the value of culture and environment.
