Local Hero

Gidday.

Hooray. We finally have an internet connection again! It is amazing how much you rely on the internet these days, especially when in a completely unusual country.
However, we should be on the home straight now, hopefully telstra won't have any reason to make our life any more difficult.

Well, we are now in our new house, it is much of an improvement on the old one. Much more room, much quieter and far more comfortable. We have a duck pond out the back, which is pretty good. There are hundreds of frogs though, when you walk over the lawn it is pretty much crawling with baby frogs. If I was French I would have no reason to be hungry that's for sure.

A few teething troubles, TV aerial fell to bits for one, but nothing we couldn't fix. Digital TV is great, I do hope Timaru gets a transmitter to cover it with terrestrial hi def by the time we come back.

I can't quite remember everything that's been going on since I last had a chance to write a proper update, as it has been an extremely busy couple of weeks.

Spent a couple of days doing cellphone site repairs, which is pretty interesting work. Good sized towers here too, it's a bit of a climb to get to the top of a 60 meter tower. Unfortunately I just managed to get the connectors up at the top of the tower untaped and ready to test when it started to rain. When I say started to rain, I am referring to the instant-on tropical rain which we get here. Within a few seconds I was soaked to the skin. 2 minutes later the rain stopped as soon as it had started, so I managed to get the antennas tested. Just as I was finishing taping the connectors the rain started up again, so it was an interesting trip back down the tower. I was well soaked by the time I got to the ground.

That's the first time I have had the aircon control on anything warmer than "full cold" since I have been here. Still getting 28 degree days here at the moment, no sign of it getting much colder as of yet. It's pretty good.

Have seen a few unique trains over here, mostly coal trains of course. Each coal train is usually 88 wagons, with 2 locos at front and 2 helpers in the middle. I think each train load of coal is worth around 2 mill.

There is a few container trains, similar in size to NZ ones. The odd passenger train (tilt train), and I saw a really interesting one the other day called the "cattle train" which, funnily enough, transports cattle. A complete train dedicated to them. Wish I had got a photo, I will hopefully get a chance to see it again.

We have a bit of a cyclone heading our way at the moment, so everyone is going around preparing, bolting things down, and removing any debris that might break stuff. We have to move all the vehicles from our yard inside, and clean up the yard to stop stuff blowing around. I'll know more as it happens, but at this point they think it will hit around Sunday morning.

Guess who's on call this weekend...

At least I have about 6 teams on standby waiting to be deployed when the cell towers start falling over.

I have a job tomorrow I have to go and walk up a mountain and fix a repeater which went off air today... I'm starting the walk at about 5:30 in the morning to try to avoid the wind, as it is slowly building up with the leadup to the hurricane. I imagine it will be blowing at the top of the hill. If I manage to dodge the snakes and don't fall off the top in the wind, I'll update some more of this thing later on.

Here's a pic from a tower I was up.

TTFN.