I’ll bet Pat Conway loved Vic that week! Loadsamoney!
I remember your ‘camp’ on the Abqaiq road. Pat had a speed boat and we used to waterski most weekends (this would be 1982 onwards, when we had graduated to ‘management’ from driving!)
I came off at an acute angle one time and received a large amount of salt water just where you don’t want it! There were several wives present, so I dived in the car and just made it to yours and Merlin’s portakabin in time!
On another tack, the previously mentioned Alan Newhouse of Behring International had had quite a big operation in Iran. The revolution of '79 cost him a fortune. His exact words were ‘We took a bath in Iran!’
American pronunciation of bath - a long hard ‘a’.
He amused us with his stories of the last days of the Shah. He said that if you went in the Pan Am office, all hell was let loose, people were climbing over each other to get to the front, shouting, tempers lost. The BA office meanwhile was a picture of calm. Everyone queued patiently, no voices were raised and the job was done more quickly!
Certainly the revolution changed attitudes in Saudi. In 1976 in Jeddah, the souk didn’t really close at prayer time. Despite the closeness to Mecca, Shutters didn’t come down, the muezzins called from the mosques and those who wanted to went off to pray and those who didn’t, carried on shopping.
It was a bit tighter on the east coast, lights would go off and the shutters came down, but certainly if you were in a restaurant you carried on eating. If you were filling up with diesel you finished filling up.
After the revolution, things changed dramatically in the east. There were lots of Shia Muslims there and I think the government feared a repetition of Iran. Within a few months everything closed at every prayer time. This gradually spread westwards until it was the same in Jeddah if I remember correctly. Those of you living there full time will remember better than me.
I guess security tightened up bit by bit over the years. We went where we liked, apart from the holy cities, most drivers wore shorts and flip flops, full stop! The only place they didn’t like that was in the restaurants. We took whatever photos we liked and nobody bothered (I wish I’d taken more). It was really quite free.
While I was there, between '76 and '87, everywhere expanded, but Riyadh was unbelievable. One of Behring’s contracts was with a company that imported peat moss from Ireland. In 1979/80, We took thousands of tons to the delivery point in Riyadh, miles out in the desert, on the Dammam side of the old airport, just emptying the containers onto the sand, where the company then used pick ups to deliver it locally to whichever government building they were beautifying.
After I stopped driving, I didn’t visit Riyadh too often, but every time I did it seemed to grow - overpasses and underpasses, tall buildings and houses. In1986, Pat, myself and a few others were invited to a weekend party at the ‘Mosvold’ furniture villa in Riyadh. We drove on the ‘new’ dual carriageway, still busy, but so much easier than the old ‘death road!’
When we arrived at the villa, in a heavily populated suburb, I realised that it was less than 100 yards from that place in the desert where we used to unload the peat moss!
In about 1999, we had an ‘old truckers’ reunion and a couple of months before, I asked the wife of a guy called Barry who lived in Barrow, but still worked in Al Khobar for Rezayat as a building manager if he would take some video for me so we could see the changes. Sharp intake of breath ‘Ooh, it’s not like it was then, you can’t even take photos now, never mind video - you’d be arrested straight away’.
So sad, but as Robert said, Tempus Fugit - and not always in a good way!
John.
