Two years, three weeks later....my work here is done.
I have two more days of work left here at the Kupol Mine Site and on Wednesday I am flying out of here.  Looking back, I only thought I'd be in Russia for about two months, maybe around six months at the most, and now over two years later the project is coming to a close.  I've slacked off a lot on updating this blog with reports of what's going on around the site, mostly because it was just a lot of the same old crap, work work work.  But now a lot of things are actually finished or on the verge of being finished.  Many parts of the Mill building are already signed over to Kinross and they are in use.  The Assay Lab has been in full operation for months now, all the Administrative Offices (and there are a lot) are signed over and full of Kinross staff, there are classrooms upstairs by the offices where they are training all the people who will be running the mill, the Truckshop (where the roof was collapsed at this time last year) is fixed and signed over.  It's a different place than it was even a few months ago that's for sure.
The carpentry side of things is almost wrapped up, I was looking over a list of what is left to do and most of it was either painting or insulating that needed to be done in various areas, I have no problem being laid off if that's all that's left to do.  The Russians that are left can have fun with that.   In about two months the last people working for Orocon should be (ideally) just about finished on the site and heading home.
Other than that, another guy died in the past week.  A Russian who was jumping out of the passenger side of one of the big Kamaz trucks landed on the ice and slipped, went into a coma and was flown out of camp and died a couple days later.
And it was National Women's Day in Russia yesterday so we had fancier food for supper...and two weeks ago was another holiday, National Defenders of the Motherland Day, again all that meant was slightly above average food for supper.
And I just found out a few weeks ago that this one Chukchi named Wasa that we were working with last year killed a guy in Bilibino last summer when he was on his break and is now in jail for the next nine years.  I was wondering why he never came back to work, I guess that's a good enough reason.  Got drunk and knifed some guy in Bilibino.  Apparently he did four years for killing a guy in Anadyr some years ago as well.
And in less depressing and slightly more humorous news, I just heard today that this other Chukchi that works here with the camp maintenance guys (and has a glass eye) decided to take one of the trucks out for a joyride yesterday because he saw it sitting there and I guess he wanted to see if he could drive.  So then he dents up one side of the truck by hitting the gymnasium (I can understand that, I mean gymnasiums can be hard to miss) and then turns around and hits a container and dents up the other side.  And for that he didn't get fired.  But if the security guys had caught him drinking a beer on any night that isn't Saturday night, he could get fired for that.
I wonder how much I'll miss how retarded it is out here.

Right, so I said I'd write about the time I spent in Greece, I keep forgetting to get to it.  Here we go then.  All the pictures I put in here are already on facebook, so there's no surprises, but I'll write more on this site instead...
Wednesday September 26th, Erica and I woke up in the morning, still in Selcuk, Turkey.  We got a ride to Kasadasi to catch the ferry to Samos, one of the Greek Islands.  Spent a day and night there, relaxing on the beach and sampling our first Greek cuisine.  (Gyros and Greek salad). 
The next day we hopped a ferry in the evening to the city of Hora on the island of Mykonos, the ferry rides through the islands are amazing, the scenery is beautiful.  Watching the sunset and the moon come up over the Aegean Sea was unforgettable.  When we got to the island it was fairly late and we rented a room from these crazy people, it was a decent place right in the middle of the city and we spent most of the next day exploring the picturesque whitewashed city.  The streets were a confusing maze of shops and little cafes and what have you, and we did some good shopping and cafe-ing while we were there.
In the afternoon we took a ferry to Santorini, where we would be spending a couple nights instead of the short one night stops on the first two islands we went to.


Once we got to Santorini we took a cab into the city of Fira (or Thira) and found a pension to stay at, then wandered around the city for the evening.  The entire island is part of a volcano and most of the city of Fira is built right along the cliff over-looking the volcanic "caldera."  I don't even know where to begin trying to describe the view there, so I'm not even going to try.  There are restaurants all along the cliffs where you can eat and drink while looking out over the caldera, and around sunset it's very busy because the sunset is so magnificent.
Our second day on Santorini we rented a quad to tour the island with, I thought we should get a moped, Erica thought we should get a car, so we settled on a quad because it's somewhere in between.  We basically made it all the way around the island during the day, stopping at a few different towns and stopping at a few beaches.  The volcanic sand on the beaches was really cool, some beaches the sand is all black and some it's all red.  The black sand burns the hell out of your feet.  Eventually we made our way back to Fira and watched the sun set and ate the "best gyros ever" at Lucky's Souvlaki.  They were definitely the best I'd ever had, but the one's at Pita Pan in Athens were pretty fantastic as well.



The next day we spent wandering around Fira, exploring the city a little more, eating great food, and shopping around.  We figured if we took the night ferry to Athens at 10pm we could just sleep on the ferry instead of having to pay for a hotel for the night.  That worked out pretty good but I'll be honest by the morning there were children on the ferry that I wanted to strangle... and to be fair, I wanted to strangle their parents just as much.  When we got to Athens we took a cab to the bus station and got out of the city without even seeing anything interesting.  We got to Delphi in the early afternoon, checked into a hotel and went to the ruins outside of town to check out the ancient buildings which included the temples of Apollo and Athina, also we went to the museum on the site.



Next day (October 2nd)  we took a bus from Delphi to Larissa, got another bus to Trikala and then got another bus to Kalampaka, which was as far north as we made it into Greece.  When we got there we checked in to the Hotel Meteora and explored the city a little.  As you get close to Kalampaka the landscape changes and all these crazy looking rock formations start popping out of the ground that shoot up sometimes hundreds and hundreds of feet straight up.  The second day we were there we explored the monasteries of Meteora.  I guess back in the day monks came to this area and started building monasteries up on the tops of these rock formations, there are over twenty of them, some still in use, some in ruin, and 6 of them are open to the public.  There's a bus that takes you up to the highest one and you can work your way down and visit each of the six monasteries as you make your way back towards Kalampaka.  It was a beautiful day and perfect for walking from one monastery to the next to the next, the whole experience was just incredible, the scenery, the buildings, everything about it.  Meteora might be the one place of everywhere we went on our trip that I would recommend most highly to anyone wanting to see Greece or Turkey.  By the end of the day we were exhausted from all the walking and all the stairs involved, but it was completely worth it.



On the 4th of October we took the early train from Kalampaka back to Athens (I recommend taking the train far above taking the bus)  In Athens we got a taxi to the Niki Hotel, and went out to explore.  We went to the Acropolis, saw the theatres and the Parthenon and all that.  Very impressive.  Walked through the Ancient Agora and saw the Temple of Hephaestus just as everything was closing for the night.
Our second day in Athens we relaxed a little more, moved to the Central Hotel, saw Hadrian's Gate and the Temple of Olympian Zeus.  We also spent some time wandering through Athen's First Cemetary.  From the rooftop of the Central we watched the sun set over the city, with a great view of the Acropolis as well.
Our third day in Athens we visited the National War Museum which was actually really interesting, then the National Art Gallery which was disappointingly uninteresting.  I could spray paint some cardboard boxes black and call it art too, doesn't mean it's worth paying to see it.  After lunch we checked out Keremikos, which had some interesting ruins and a rat infestation.  Then the Herakleidon Museum which had a great exhibit of celebrity portraits by Francesco Scavullo, and the main reason we went there, was an M.C. Escher's exhibit, there was about 20 to 25 of his works, which was the highlight of the day.  Then we saw the Roman Agora on the way back to the hotel, drank some wine on the rooftop as the sun went down and went for sushi after the sunset.
The next day, my last full day in Greece we took the Metro to the Archaeological Museum which was a great way to lose yourself for a few hours, it's a huge museum and surprisingly it's free to see.  The afternoon we wandered around the city a bit more, picking up last minute souveniers and what have you.  Basically relaxed as much as we could, knowing that the next day I had to go back to Russia.

Last day of vacation, we took the metro to the airport, ate some souvlaki and said our sad goodbyes, Erica was staying in Greece for a couple more days before heading back to Canada, and I was flying back to Moscow and then back to work.  When I got to Moscow there was a driver waiting with my tickets to Magadan for the next day and he drove me to the Novotel Hotel where I had a room waiting for me.  (this was a huge relief because when I left Athens I still hadn't even gotten a reply on whether or not there was a flight to Magadan available and as far as I knew I was on my own as far as transportation and hotels were concerned.  I was not very happy with the people in charge of booking our flights for work at that point, which is a long story, but whatever, they came through for me last minute and things worked out...)
At the hotel I met up with the same three Slovakian tin-bashers that I flew out of camp with and in the morning we flew across Russia towards Magadan but had about a 5 or 6 hour layover in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, so now I can finally, honestly say I've been to Siberia, and we went into the downtown part of the city for supper.  At 11:10pm our flight to Magadan left and we got to Magadan early the next morning to find out we would be staying there for the night instead of continuing on to camp.  (fine by me, I hadn't really gotten any sleep on the flights and with all the time zone changes I wasn't even sure how long I had been awake).  We went in to the city, to the apartments again and I had a nap for a few hours, woke at 5 in the evening and was wide awake all night, watching crappy movies waiting for our ride to the airport to show up at 8am.
The next day was a pretty standard flying in to camp day.  Magadan to Keperveyem to Kupol.  By the time we got to camp and settled in I was pretty exhausted and in the evening after supper I crashed pretty hard.  And as far as I can tell... that's the end of the story.  Now I'm back in camp, over halfway done my shift already, it's just flying by and I'm looking forward to getting out of here in December and enjoying Christmas time.  Maybe sometime soon I'll make another post with an update of what's going on at work.  It's already cold as hell, hitting the minus thirties sometimes and there are not many hours of daylight anymore.

Well, I've put it off as long as I could but I guess it's time to update this thing just in case anyone actually still checks to see if I have.  I haven't really had much to write about in camp this summer anyways, most of the pictures would have been more of the same old work stuff, maybe I'll post more next shift when some areas of the mill are looking a little bit closer to being done.  A couple weeks ago about 20 or so Chukchi's wandered across the tundra and set up their tents near our camp, they had about 4000 cariboo with them, one evening some of us went down to meet them and take some pictures, they were very friendly but we didn't get to see their cariboo up close, here's some pictures of their camp anyways.

The Chukchi's camp, that's the bad-ass Chukchi-mobile over on the right.

I'm finally two days away from the end of a very long stretch of work, ten hours every day for 80 days is a little much (I did 92 last year, but that doesn't make 80 any easier).  Right now at work I am building the security offices over the vault that will hold all the gold when it is finished being processed, that's kind of cool to think that right under where we are working, millions or billions of dollars worth of gold will pass.

Here's a couple of the Chukchi's hanging out by the dining tent. 

So as long as the weather permits, I will be flying to Magadan on Monday, then to Moscow on Tuesday, and into Istanbul on Wednesday.  Thursday Erica flys in to Istanbul from Canada and we spend the next two weeks touring Turkey, then we head into Greece for two weeks to see whatever is left of it and then back to Moscow on October 8th and then back to camp.  That's the basic rundown.  I was originally planning on writing more but there is this guy in this room who's music and foot odour are both intolerable, so I gotta get out of here...maybe I'll start packing for the trip.


This is the camp as we were approaching it, you can see a few cariboos on the hill up behind the tents.  A few of the men had just finished supper and were heading back out to round up the herd before nighttime.

Saturday night on the "Which" stage.  The Flaming Lips are playing.

While I was flying back into Canada my last time coming in from Russia, I picked up a copy of the current Paste Magazine at the Anchorage Airport. Paste is an American music magazine and this issue had a cover story on summer music festivals. So I read the article on the flight from Anchorage to Vancouver. One of the lines at the beginning that was summing up what summer music festivals are like these days struck me as amusing and it started out as follows; "Close your eyes and picture skipping around a carnival designed by Walt Disney, Willy Wonka and Wayne Coyne while they're on a three-day Peyote Bender..."

Now, I say I found that line funny at the time I read it but now in retrospect I realize something that I didn't realize at the time but now see as too obvious, and that is the simple fact that the author of that article had been to the Bonnaroo Music Festival before and that didn't sink in until after only because I, on the other hand had not. To be honest, I'm not sure I could describe the Bonnaroo experience much better than that.

80,000 people wandering between stages, Sunday evening.  The dust in the air was getting pretty bad by then from so many people walking around.

Camping in one of many fields packed with tents and vehicles for four days, getting up every morning to stand in a line for the closest thing to a shower you could get in our part of the campground, which was basically two trough sink type things with running water so you could kind of splash yesterdays dust and sweat and sunscreen off yourself.  Then standing in line to get into the the actual festival grounds, which had a very carnival like air to it, complete with ferris wheel at one end.  Must have been hundreds of booths spread out all over the place, selling every kind of food or clothing or cds or beer or what have you.  And you are constantly surrounded by crowds of people wandering around the festival grounds, every kind of people you can think of from hippies to hillbillies and punks to deadheads (never have I seen so many dedicated Grateful Dead fans before, so much tie-dye, so much hair), to people painted completely blue or orange or red, or walking around on stilts.  And everyone was just there to have a good time, listen to great music, enjoy the sun, (or by the end of the weekend try to find places to hide from it).  The general vibe of the festival was very laid back and friendly, no one with an attitude problem, no one looking for trouble. 

Gotta love the port-a-potties.

There was over 100 bands there so it was impossible to see everything that was going on, many times you would watch a half hour at one stage and then head over to the next to catch the last fifteen minutes, then over to another one for something else.  It was nonstop.  See www.bonnaroo.com for the full list of bands, and lots of pictures from the weekend.  Some of the highlights of the weekend for me had to be seeing the Flaming Lips Saturday night after the Police played.  The Lips landed on the stage in a giant UFO and came out of the bottom of it, then Wayne (the singer) inflated out the top of the UFO in a giant bubble, then he rolled down onto the audience and walked around on top of everyone for a while like a giant hamster in a hamster-ball.  Then he went back, got out of the bubble and they started playing.  I could write a few pages on that performance alone....
Also The Old Crow Medicine Show put on an outstanding performance Saturday afternoon. Man, that skinny little hillbilly can wail.  White Stripes Sunday night as the sun was setting over 80,000 people who would rather be nowhere else in the world.  Ween put on a great show from what I caught of it, Uncle Earl and Gillian Welsh were both joined onstage by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin who produced the last Uncle Earl album and was playing mandolin for a couple songs of each of those sets.  Wilco was amazing, even better than last time I saw them...  The Decemberists, never disappointing in the three times I've seen them (gotta be honest though, I kinda miss Petra Haden).  It's getting late so I'm having trouble remembering who all was there....  Either way, you get the point, much greatness.  Also there was something that was new there this year, a tent called the Bonnarouge tent, which was mostly performances by groups doing old-timey carnival or travelling medicine show type performances, everything from cabaret, to magic to, sword swallowing and fire-eating, to burlesque, and everything else you could imagine.  The music was all amazing and the performances and costumes were outstanding.  The Yard Dogs Road Show was one of my favorite parts of the entire weekend for sure.  Check them out if you ever get the chance to, it's a show you are not likely to forget.

The Yard Dogs Roadshow

The Old Crow Medicine Show

The Flaming Lips.

The White Stripes


Manu Chao

More Yard Dogs...

More Flaming Lips, Wayne is walking over the audience in the giant hamster ball.

Someone spray painted "God Bless The Flaming Lips"  all over the place on Sunday.  I was using this honeybucket when it got tagged.


Everything looked surreal Sunday evening as the sun was going down over the 80,000 festival goers.  The dust kicked up into the air added a strange glow to the pictures.

Then sadly, the day after the festival was all over, we had to get up early in the morning and drive back into Nashville, Chris dropped me off at the airport and I flew back to work.  Nashville to Altanta to Moscow to Magadan for a night, then in the morning Magadan to Keperveyem to Kupol.  And thus concludes my summer.  Which ironically ended on the first day of summer.  I got back in to camp on the 21st of June.

Ruby, the roadtripmobile.

June 11th, 2007.  Chris and myself embark on a roadtrip in his (then only a couple weeks in his possession) '91 Volkwagon Campervan.  A very sweet machine, possibly the sweetest for any sort of roadtripping.  Our destination, Manchester, Tennesee about 45 minutes out of Nashville.  The purpose of the trip, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival 2007.  We started the trip in Manitoba so basically we pointed Ruby south and stepped on the gas pedal.  And as we drove down through those United States I couldn't help thinking, "Isn't this what summer should be all about?  Roadtrips to strange places you've never been to, for music and camping, and crazy people you've never met but will never forget?"  (ironically the weekend ended with me flying back to Russia to work every single day of the summer)  But that was the furthest thing from my mind for the entire weekend....

Here's some pictures, we didn't stop at to many places along the way, a couple campgrounds to sleep for the night, and our plan was to get to Nashville as quickly as we could so we could spend a little time there before carrying on to the festival.

Nashville, every single building in the city has live music going on inside every single night...that's a fact.

The Country Music Hall of Fame, obviously something you can't leave Nashville without seeing.  Here's a small sampling of what's inside, there's Johnny's black suit, Willie's sneakers and bandana, Dolly's dress and wig, Waylon's guitar, etc... So much more as well, Elvis' cadillac, and a collection of Ray Charles' sunglasses, also Ray's braille editions of popular magazines like Playboy, that left me with a lot of questions, like, "what's the point?" or, "is there a centerfold?"

Then in the late evening we left Nashville and headed towards Manchester.  The gates to Bonnaroo were opening first thing the next morning and we didn't want to wait in line all day.  We stopped in Murfreesboro for some last minute supplies from Walmart and the closer we got to Manchester the more we could see other people that were heading to the same place as we were.  Finding a cooler or bottled water at any Walmart in Tennesee was probably hard to do that weekend.   Then in Manchester it seemed like the Walmart parking lot was the place to camp out for the night for everyone that was in town for the festival, the lot was completely packed with vehicles around midnight when we got there so we decided to set up camp as well. 

And the next morning...Bonnaroo time.

Up at 6:30 in the morning to get into the festival that wasn't even really starting until the evening.  But I think I'll get more into that next time, I'm going to sleep now.  Here's a couple pics from in the festival, I'll get the better ones on here in the next couple days.

Once again, a sea of tents and vehicles.

The gate to the carnival that is Bonnaroo.

This is the view of the mainstage at the Sasquatch Fest, that's the Gorge with the Columbia River down there behind it.  It's a beautiful place for a music festival.

Ok, so I finally got this stupid internet working on my side so I can get another blogful of pictures posted tonight.  This batch is from the weekend of May 26th and 27th when Me, Erica, Chris, Kristi, and Jess (and Carl came along up to Seattle...) went down to Washington State, two hours to the East of Seattle.  To a place called The Gorge Amphitheater for a two day event known as The Sasquatch Music Festival.  Two years ago when I went it was only a one day event so the experience was different this year because we camped out at the festival for the weekend.  Fields and fields full of tents and cars and port-a-potties.  The lineup this year wasn't quite as good as the first year I went but there was definately enough great acts to make it worthwhile.  Check out the website www.sasquatchfestival.com for the whole lineup.  Some of the highlights for me had to be The Beastie Boys (two nights in a row!), Neko Case (who I've been wanting to see for about 6 years), The Arcade Fire (who stole the show the first year I was at the festival, and did just as good or better this time around), Bjork (I can't say I know that much of her music, but I can't say I wasn't impressed by her performance), Interpol, Blackalicious, Mix Master Mike, and on and on and on....  The only unfortunate thing is that with three stages going at once you can't catch every act you want to check out.  Anyways...here's some pictures............

Everyone but me, setting up camp...

Neko Case

Bjork headlined the mainstage the first night. (she's that yellow thing in the middle of the stage)

and here's another girl that I am a fan of...

The Arcade Fire

The Beastie Boys, this picture is from the first night when they played a purely "instrumental" set on one of the smaller stages.  They seemed to pretty much own the whole festival this year, they then headlined the mainstage the second night, Mix Master Mike opened the mainstage both days, their keyboardist Money Mark played a solo set the second day, and their percussionist played with Blackalicious as well.  (Mike D's jewfro played a solo set too)

The Mainstage at night.

I figured I'd throw in this picture as well.  After the festival Erica and I spent a night in Seattle, she had never been there so we went to see some of the sights.  This picture was taken from the top of the spaceneedle. 

And thus concludes my bloggery for today.  Join us next time for some pictures of me and Chris' roadtrip down to Tennesee for the Bonnaroo music festival.  (there will be quite a few pictures from that festival, I might have to break it up into two blogs...then after that I might be caught up to the present)

I'm having some severe technical difficulties with the internet here in Russia....I have a lot more pictures I want to get all up in here, but I'll have to keep working at it until things cooperate with me....keep checking back though.

A few days after getting back into Canada, I believe it would be around May 22nd and 23rd, I went camping with a good pile of friends up at our great little camping spot up on the cliffs outside of the village at Hemlock Valley Resort.  Good friends, good beer, and good times had by all.... until we woke up in the morning and looked down the cliffs to the road and noticed one of the vehicles we had parked there had disappeared during the night.  Here are some random pictures from the camping trip.

We had to take advantage of the last little pile of snow up on the mountain...

Jesse couldn't understand why they didn't take his truck instead...

It's finally time to sit down and start catching up on the 'ol blog, I had the last five weeks off and have been too busy relaxing and travelling around to be bothered with keeping this up to date.  I'll start at the beginning of my break and work my way to the present.  Hopefully I'll be able to get four or so blogs out in the next week.


Crazy looking little snowmobile in Keperveyem, Russia

When I left camp it was the 15th of May and after ten weeks in Russia I was more than ready to get home.  We ended up leaving one day later than we were supposed to but no big deal.  First we flew to Keperveyem where I took that picture of the crazy looking little snowmobile.

Then we flew in to Magadan where we stayed for three nights.  We were only supposed to stay for two but there was some bad weather so it got extended a little.  Once again no big deal.  One of the days we were there we got together with one of the Security Guards who works in our camp and he drove us around the city and showed us some of the sights.  The most impressive part of the tour was going up to see the big stone monument up on the hill overlooking the city.  It is called "The Mask of Sorrow" and was built as a memorial for all the millions of people that died in the Gulags, the Russian labour camps in this region of the country.  It is a mean looking mask that is shedding some tears, the tears all have faces on them that represent the people who died, and there is a staircase that goes up one side of the face and a door that goes into a prison cell inside the face, then one eye is a barred window from the cell.
Then on the backside of the mask there is a woman on her knees crying or praying or something and above her is a headless man on a cross.  Below the mask on the hill are the names of many of the labour camps.

It was quite an intimidating looking monument, but also a very interesting experience standing on the hill looking at it. 
So anyways that was the highlight of the stay in Magadan.  Then we drank lots of vodka and then went back to Canada.  Tomorrow I'll try to post the next part of my vacation.