Transcript
So Tarin Kowt, so it's huge. I remember looking at it, particularly from that tower, you could get a reasonable view of the whole city area I guess, so it's very flat. This is all from memory a long time ago, very flat, dusty environment. The dust is something that is out of this world. So I just remember that the skin on your hands and your knuckles would constantly be cracked, you'd be pulling blood clots out of your nose every day constantly.
When aircraft would land or choppers would land, it would black out the sun from the dust and then the dust would settle. It was a really just extreme environment and then you'd go through 50 degrees in summer to maybe zero to three degrees in winter. So the extremes in temperature are phenomenal. Accommodation wise, I don't really have too much recollection of my first visit there from an accommodation point of view but it was much the same as my second.
We were living in wooden huts and they had about 20 beds in them each or thereabouts maybe, from memory, maybe less, maybe less. But you have your own bed space and that was the difference between my first trip and the second trip. The second trip, people had spent more time there, so they'd set up a bit more infrastructure in the huts in particular. What I really enjoyed about my second trip there was that I had my own bed space and it was a bit of a private space, which is really important.
You don't get any privacy over there and so to have your own space was important, you could put some photos up of your family and your dogs, you could have your own stuff there and that was your space. And everyone respected your space, no one would come in. So you could sit down at the end of the day and watch a DVD or something and just get away from it all. But they were wooden huts, they weren't insulated, you got used to sleeping in a noisy environment.
