Arandis

Well finally back in Swakopmund after a week out in Arandis (near Rössing Uranium Mine) …it was quite a quiet week as you will probably guess from the view out of my room window.

No dunes here…. just desert. In that direction it looks like that for some 100's of kilometers. Sometimes it amazes me how people will form settlements in pretty much the middle of nowhere for the single purpose of mining minerals from under the soil – thousands of people will spend the majority of their lives out here where there is little water (and little else) just for work, just to dig up uranium. And there will be even more soon – there are several more mines planned for the area.

Course went reasonably well. Some of the guys struggled a bit, but we are getting used to seeing folks surprised at the technical nature of what we are trying to teach them. Still they were a great bunch of guys and the training centre at NIMT certainly has a good sense of urgency about getting their training programmes up to scratch so that they are producing industry friendly candidates.

Nice thing about visiting these locations is that there is plenty of time to think and to do some of my course work. It is amazing my ideas far out strip the time I have available. Just sitting in a place like that I start to order some of the wild thoughts that run around in my mind and I start to realise just how short life really is.

Well, enough philosophy! Went sand boarding today and it was awesome – we except for the walk up the dune after every run! They produced a DVD of the morning’s activities and I had to laugh - we really were going quite pathetically slowly. I can’t wait to actually get out on a real snow slope some time (with ski lifts)