Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Reflections


We have been in Bintulu for almost a week now, staying at home most of the days, very relaxed and too much rest!! It was eat, sleep, tv, read, playing with the kids, tidbits and more sleep. I feel the 'bulges' in the mid section beginning to form!! The kids kept us entertained most of the time, especially Haadieya, the little one, who controls her elder brothers and insists on our attention every time the two boys are with us. She has not develop her vocabulary yet, and the only words that come out of her mouth are 'there', 'thedy', 'bah' and other single syllable baby sounds. But she appears as though she is growing up to be a talkative person, besides being hyperactive and cheeky too. She gets annoyed when she babbles her monotonic syllables but is ignored by us. Sometime she will come and tap our mouths for not responding to her! Quite a demanding little one!!

Having a lot of time to relax left me to reflect on many things, especially of the past, and being in Bintulu my mind kept flashing back to the days when I was working in Bintulu some 24 years ago. So much development has taken place in Bintulu since then.

When I first arrived in Bintulu that many years ago, only Fokker aircrafts, or those smaller, could land at the airport. Bintulu was then a very small fishing village with some six or seven thousand residents. The airport was right smack in the middle of the town. I believe the airport started off with just an air strip to cater for smaller aircrafts, like the twin otter, and slowly developed or expanded to accommodate the Fokker. The town meanwhile grew around the airport. As it grew there was limited space for further development of the landing strip to allow bigger aircrafts to land. The sea was at one end of the airstrip and a river was at the other end. Hence a new location had to be found for a bigger airport and a longer landing strip or runway.

It was one Monday morning in May of 1982 when I touched down in Bintulu on board an MAS Fokker flight from Kuching. That trip was a sort of familiarization trip to acquaint myself with the place on my assignment to a project involving the building of an Ammonia / Urea Plant and its related complex there. I was sitting on the window side of the aircraft. While in the air, all I could see on the ground were vast jungle land with rivers meandering along its way. Dots of shacks with zinc roofs could be seen here and there and these I believed were the longhouses, mostly built close to the river.

This first trip into Bintulu was not without some fun. On approaching the town, nay, it was just a village then, I could see from the air only three roads and several blocks of buildings close to the airstrip, which later turned out to be double storied shop houses, most of them wooden buildings. Off the roads and by the river banks were wooden houses of all shapes and sizes, close to each other, most of them on stilts and stretched out over the river. The plane was aligned for landing and the passengers prepared for it but the landing was aborted. Passengers looked at each other wondering. The plane circled the area and made a second attempt and was again aborted. As the plane gathered height I thought to myself, “is this aircraft piloted by a rookie?”. The weather was fine and clear, there was only one aircraft to land, and the aircraft engines appeared ok, hence what’s the problem?. A short while later the pilot came on the pa system apologizing for having to abort the landing as there were stray dogs on the runway!! Ha ha ha. Phewwh! That was a relief. Looking out the window at the airstrip I spotted several people, presumably security personnel, chasing a number of dogs on the runway!! I can bet that this was not the first time they were chasing dogs.

There were no proper hotels in Bintulu at that time, except for a few lodging houses amongst the shop houses, which appeared rather ‘shady’ then. There was one reasonably sized ‘hotel’ though that was built hurriedly to cater for the ‘onslaught’ of the project personnel and other visitors to Bintulu. This hotel was built by the beach some five kilometers from the town using temporary materials mostly. The lobby, lounges and restaurants have no ceilings and one can see the air-conditioning ducting cris-crossing the top of the lobby and the roof was of metal sheets. The rooms were actually metal-clad ‘porta-cabins’ maybe 8ft. by 12ft. with only a small window on the door to the rooms. So, the room was only for sleeping unless one enjoys torturing oneself by staying in the room or more aptly ‘cubicle’ looking at empty walls.

I was taken to visit the project site located some twelve kilometers away at the other end of the bay that Bintulu was located in. I learnt then that the twelve kilometers of road was the only decent road out of Bintulu town then!! People used the river to commute from Bintulu and the hinterland in those days. That explained the small number of vehicles, mostly four-wheeled drive vehicles, on the roads. One can lie down in the middle of the road without any chance of being run over!! Earthworks had started on the project site while next to our project site, separated by a hill, was another project to build an LNG plant, the largest in the world at that time. This plant was then in the pre-construction phase. Hence there were quite a lot of project activities going on at this end of the bay.

In the next two years, Bintulu developed very fast to cope with the influx of people attending to the two projects and also the development of the port facilities (being built for the government) to cater for the two projects and those involved in businesses that were spin-offs from the projects.

I made several more trips to Bintulu in 1982 before being assigned to the Contractors office in Tokyo for the engineering design of the plant. From Bintulu to Tokyo…. what a contrast…… I will try to write more on my reflections later……..

MKI Ramblings Unlimited
Bintulu

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