Dirty Dan:
Hi Robert! Some verry good pics there,what were they hauling down to Baku?
Ahem! The answer to your question is yet another of those ‘coals to Newcastle’ tales. An Aberdeen company had patented the simple idea of roping small concrete blocks together to form mats for holding down oil pipes in the Caspian Sea off Baku. Result: hundreds of 20-tonne mats came out of Scotland that could have been just as easily made on location in Baku. The Caspian Sea was so polluted that it was a bright, lurid emerald greeny turquoise colour when we went down there. Georgia had been totally trashed by the Russians when they left and the roads were murder, the towns half-demolished - especially Batumi in the south - and dead tanks stood along the roadsides. As I understood it the patents for the Scottish mats were about to run out, and I think the Azerbaijan ran out along with the patent! My mind is rusty on this issue but if anyone can find my LDD there’s more detail in there. Robert 
