Losing myself (and others) in Kuwait

It was quite a day. Fun in some strange way but unnerving in others. During my stay in Kuwait I was allowed to go off base twice, both for medical reasons. It seems the only way to get medical supplies is to personally hand deliver your request to the class VIII people (medical supply). In this wondrous day of computers, e-mail, faxes and phones, the personal touch is still needed by some. This little story is a recount of my second trip to AJ (can't remember the whole name). I was in charge of our little group - tell you why in a minute.

Captain Getting Some Rays On The Start Of A Very Long Trip

It all started very smoothly one sunny day. We were suppose to leave the day before but couldn't get all the papers, driver and truck until late in the day so we waited. The next day we got started about 0900, good start. As you can see from above there isn't much to see outside of base. This was the first thing for about 20 miles. I got to be in charge of this little outting because the driver had never been off base and my back seat, Scott, had slept most of the way the last time we went. Our strip map only included about half the route and didn't have names, only grid coordinates of the the different areas. Kuwait city has a lot of roads and is looped kind of like San Antonio. But still, everything seemed to be ok. After all we are in a friendly country, right. Well then why do we drive off base in uniform and each with a M4 and magazine of ammo?

The desert is big out here and not like central Oregon's high desert. It's like movie deserts. And it went on

and on

and on

for about an hour. The first sign that you are getting close to something is all the power lines. It's like being right next to Bonneville dam, without the dam. It seems to just be a collection of power plant lines that converge on Kuwait city.

As you draw closer to Kuwait city you begin to see other things. The next is water towers. And then of course you begin to see mosques. Some of which are very interesting in there placement.

If you look closely at this next picture you will see a mosque and Burger King right next to each other. In fact this was repeated on both sides of the highway just across from each other. In total we saw something like 10 Burger Kings in and around Kuwait city.

The second one is a close up of the mosque from the parking lot of the Burger King.

Advertising is somthing else a little bit different. If you look below you can see some writing on the overpass listing out someone's business. There were very few billboards and what we saw were mostly for cell phones or internet service. The ones on the overpass were more interesting. Sometimes over to the left there would be a little message too. There were things like: Buckle Up, Speeding Kills, Don't put your kids in the front seat. Most of the time these were written in English with Arbic subtitles.

These were some of the first houses we got close to. They were building all over the place on this edge of town. The other side of the highway was just desert or old military base looking structures. The main road to our destination was called loop 7. Later on our miss adventure we found out that this is the outer most loop and that there are really 7 loops. Trust me, we passed them all!

Almost forgot about this picture. It is interesting in that the sign is both in English and Arabic. This is very common, we found out, on the outskirts of town. When you are lost downtown the signs are only in Arabic!

As I stated, it was a wonderful sunny day. We had driven through the desert to come to Kuwait city. Shoot, the tank was almost on empty. They didn't fill it up the night before and we were in such a hurry to get going that we didn't check it. Lucky they had me along for the ride! I remembered that the highway had lots of gas stations. Shouldn't be too tough. Pull in, swipe your card and get some gas. Wrong! No card reader and no english speaking attendant. We only got 20L,(5 gals). Just enough to make it back to base. Didn't know the exchange rate. Didn't have any local money. The attendant didn't want us talking to the cashier, so we bartered for the gas. At first I had a 20.00 showing and that made him very happy, but I said no. We quickly found a 10.00, but I was looking for a 5.00 to give him. None could be found, so we settled on the ten, figuring that 2.00 per gallon was not too bad. We got in and found out that our passenger had a calculator. After figuring what the exchange rate was, we found out that we should of paid only 3.75 for what we got. The whole thing was very ackward and we felt somewhat cheated but what do you do? They knew we weren't from around there. The uniforms gave that away.

We were on the road again, with gas!

At one of the turns to a different highway we saw a police station (above), what a relief. Well maybe not.

We made it to AJ without any other problems, actually got there on the first try. We dropped off the person that was suppose to stay there for a few days and did the rest of our business and began the 2 hour drive back to our base. Hard parts over, everyone stayed awake and saw how we got there.

Well it isn't that easy. Exits are not marked very well and one thing lead to another and we were lost. This part of the story is kind of exciting or scary, depending on how you want to remember it. Exciting part was seeing a foreign courntry's capital and some of the different cultures around the world. Scary is not being able to speak the lanuage and knowing that there are people in this country that hate you and your country and would love to make an example out of you. Could that be why we all carried M4's with ammo? The buildings were an interesting mix of modern and what I would call middle eastern. There is a lot of building going on. I don't think OSHA exsist though. Some of the scaffling was made out of tree branches, the highest we saw was 4 stories high.

Mosque in down town. No english signs here didn't hang out very long. People looked at us a little funny in our uniforms.

Nice sports statium off one of the loops. Saw the national shooting club grounds too. Very nice, but it does not look like anyone ever uses them.
Later on a great site for sore eyes. A US MRAP. They were out doing drivers training. We saw this one on the way back to base. We missed another turn off and almost headed to Jordan. We decided to follow this guy for a while after that.

On a Kuwait Air Force base. This was one of the best sunsets of our time there.

Our base from a distance. It doesn't look like much, but it sure was good to be back.

Thanks for all the notes people have been sending to the blog. I enjoy each and everyone of them. If you have specific questions I will try to answer them. Your post do not leave an E-mail address for me to send things back to though. I'm not ignoring you. Please put your E-mail address in the note for a personal e-mail back, thanks.

In Iraq now and will try to be more proactive about doing the blog. Things have been very busy. Setting up a clinic from almost scratch has been a lot harder than it was just walking into one like in Afghanistan. I am already looking forward to being back home next spring. I miss you all!