Kuwait Day 8 - Souk Salah - The Weapons Market

“Do we really want to go out in that?” I asked Matt, pointing at the darkening clouds and the flat blobs of rain splatting down on the road in front of us.

“Why not?” boomed the 61 year old Texan in his baritone voice, “It’ll be an adventure”

So off we went to Souk Salah, the Weapon’s Market. As awesome and horrific as that sounds, it’s a historic name for Kuwait City’s oldest market, and in fact has no weapons in sight. I was pleased to discover this when a friendly local suggested it early in the day. And if my American counterpart was game for getting a cab to some far flung part of the city and exploring I certainly wasn’t going to back down!

The aforementioned rain put paid to our plans to film the city (for the fourth time) today, and so off we set. Our adventure got off to a somewhat shaky start, as we first had to go to a money exchange to get Matt’s dollars turned into local Dinars, at which point he’d realised he’d left his glasses in the hotel. Our Bangladesh taxi driver then took us to Souk Saliah - which was at the wrong end of town. As it turns out, the money exchange was in the Souk Salah itself, and so we set off retracing our steps once again.

Memories of Egypt and some stereotypical ideas made me expect a buzzing bazaar, ride with shouting locals and hordes of vendors trying to lure you into their shops and to see the latest alabaster models at their stalls. Nothing could be further from what i’d expected. Covent Garden is more down market and pushy, and for the first two hours we had the shops to ourselves. Not once did anyone try and lure us into a shop, nothing but polite straightforwardness. It was brilliant! That’s not to say there weren’t the typical characters and friendly nutters you’d hope to find at a large market.

"I love Americans", hopefully he likes us brits too...

After a spot of shopping and explaining to Matt how wearing local thawbs (full length tunics) would make us look like “twats” or “twots” as he insisted on pronouncing it, we stopped for tea. The locals were friendly, everyone in the tea parlour greeting us and smiling. And before we had time to pay at the end, we discovered a local had treated us to the drinks on him. He wanted nothing in exchange, he was simply being hospitable.

This old dude was too awesome to not photo.

Some further shopping and a bit of bartering later we headed back to the hotel on foot and got thoroughly lost in the process. Spotting a Costa Coffee house we decided to have a spot of coffee and see if we could ask someone to point us in the right way. Before we got inside a friendly trio of locals spoke to us “Hello, where are you from?”, “Ah American! English! Thank you, thank you for freeing Kuwait” he went on to say after we’d introduced ourselves. We then ended up treated to more coffee at our hosts insistence “No thank you, you saved us from Saddam. George Bush very good. Mrs Thatcher very good.”

The best thing about travelling is meeting open minded interesting people. We chewed the fat with perfect strangers for the best part of two hours. We laughed at each other’s jokes, shared stories, talked politics and religion (both Matt’s favorite subjects), and I even managed to sneak in my Top Gear story - much to the amazement of my new friend Sala, a big fan of the show. 

And they even helped me dress up to like like a twot....

Sala, Ben of Arabia, Abdul and Nayve

Wyoming Days 5,6,7 - Riverton to Black Hills

My god! The last few days have gone by in a blur.

In fact, apart from an hour's flying this morning we've actually finished.

The week has gone quickly and it's been pretty intense. The blog has suffered as I've been almost without internet for four days. I cannot suggest strongly enough not to stay at the Hampton Inn - the internet speeds are a complete joke!

Fortunately, back at the Best Western, or Best Worsten as we lovingly call it, the internet is back and once we get back from today's shoot I'll be able to update this blog properly!

Wyoming Day 3 & 4 - Rawlins to Riverton

Holy moly I have gone and made a video:

Fortunately the sounds, image quality and balance of the finished Skyworks product is much much better, but it's still not bad for a GoPro camera. Afixing it on the outside of the helicotper was pretty nerve racking - but I put my new knot tying skills to the test as a backup in case the mount dislodged.

The sound is awful, the picture needs colour correction, the editing is sloppy (seems my aging Mac just cannae cope with 1080p footage) - but at the end of the day it looks pretty sweet!


We finally saw a Moose! Well three of them. In the middle of a bloody desert! We spent hours scouring the mountains of Montana where they are supposed to be, only find find them lurking where they shouldn't. Silly Moose. Is the plural still Moose, or perhaps Meese like Geese? Silly Meese. Yeah, that sounds good (despite being totally wrong, I'm sure).

Day four and we've settled into our groove. Despite terrible weather and a warning on thunder storms, we managed to dodge the worst of it successfully all day. Well, I say that - we were at times filming through the rain, but if you zoom in on a wide aperture you can filter out all the rain drops anyway so the footage still looked stunning. Richard got a bit wet in the front - it seems the Helicopter isn't that waterproof.

As we were flying along, Simon the pilot pointed out that we lack callsigns for when we radio Colin. So we are now "The Septic Chickens", calling "Mother Goose". Mother Goose delivered in spades today, bringing us Ice Cream to the landing pad at lunch time from Wyoming's famous Ice Cream parlour.

That combined with a huge burger and fries shortly after seems to have filled me up completed. I didn't even eat any supper!

The weather forecast is equally bad for today - but we are hoping to get off the ground and get up in the air regardless. Only two more filming days to go! How time flies.

Wyoming Day 2 - Cheyenne to Rawlins

Another day, another long long day. So long in fact, that darkness had once again decended before I'd finished checking the tapes. But, the good news is we are caught up and back on schedule. The bad news is that I'm so knackered that after our meal at an awesome 50's style diner (buffalo burger and salad), I got back and went straight to bed. Just now, as I started writing this, I had to open up Google Maps and press the "current location" button just to check where I am!

We were all looking forward to staying at the Hampton Inn - good comfy beds, normally nicely kitted out, "probably have pretty fast internet" said Richard. No luck on that last count. Just loading the blog took about 2 minutes. It's the slowest connection I've ever used. Simon took a great pic of me yesterday allegedly - the internet is too slow to download it. So I can neither view it nor upload it here. In fact I can't upload any photos.

On the plus side this means I can claim to have filmed or done any number of things. So I shall. Yesterday we filmed a herd of elephants, all mounted by heavily armored monkeys in the process of staging a riot outside the local police station. Then we had a small spaceship fly alongside us, and established first contact with another world. Then finally as we stopped for lunch, a bald eagle popped over, hopped in the helicopter, started it up and took it for a spin. He brought it safely back, jumped out and gave us a look as if to say 'not bad'. Pics to follow soon....

Wyoming Day 2 - Rapid City (SD) to Cheyenne

Today was a long and arduous day. No really - it was a day so long and tiring that by the time we got to the hotel in the evening I actually fell asleep in the lobby whilst waiting for us to check in. Richard had to wake me up! How embarassing...

The start of the day was beset with small problems. Our missing bracket finally arrived, and we spent a couple of hours fitting it. Then we went for a test flight, and shot some air to air stuff around Crazy Horse. Simon found that the helicopter was only delivering 98% of its power, and so the next couple of hours were spent tuning up the Jet Ranger to get those missing 2%. Ordinarily that might sound like perfectionism gone mad - particularly when were were starting so late in the day, but a Jet Ranger with a Cineflex and three people and all the gear is pretty heavy - those 2% matter a lot!

Finally, we set off and roared into the skies of Wyoming.

I shot a bit of footage on my GoPro - and have decided the mount is useless. I'm going to try and improvise tomorrow, but it looks like it's sat on a washing machine on full spin.

Due to our late start, we weren't able to stop for lunch. So I ate a packet of beef jerky, a banana and a bag of popcorn. Nice.

The rest of the day went well, and we landed just as night was falling. The footage came out perfect, and all in all our first filming day went swimmingly.


I also made an interesting observation (at least to me - everyone else will no doubt find it utterly dull). At the end of the day, we need to charge up a battery that we use to run the system at the end of the day once the helicopter has powered down and I'm checking tapes. Charging the battery up is a bit of a pain, as you aren't supposed to do it in a hotel room or office room (due to the very small chance of leakage of noxious fumes). So we need to get it into a hanger and leave it on charge over night. And I've observed the following.

1) If I walk into the terminal and ask if we can charge our battery, they say no.
2) If I bring the battery into the terminal (it's big - like a car battery), hold it up, and say can I charge it, they say yes. If I ask where and explain it can't be in an office they will often say "sorry, we can't help"
3) If I bring the battery into the terminal, hold it up, and say "Hey, can we charge this up, we normally leave it in a hanger overnight", they say yes, without question, every time.

What I'm asking is the same each time, but it's the way I ask that makes the difference.


Oh, and cos this post is just a wall of text, here's a picture that made me laugh:

Wyoming Day 1 - The Rig

Like the four horsemen of the apocalypse we have returned. Death, War, Famine and Pestilence as the locals have named us, or Richard, Colin, Simon and myself as we're actually called.

On our last adventure we filmed the top left bit of Wyoming (Yellowstone National Park), and now we're back to finish the job and finish the state. No corner will be left unshot. No bird's nest will be left undisturbed as we roar through the sky.. ahem. No. We're actually quite discreet and most of the time you'd struggle to know we're there!

This shoot is going to be our shortest yet in the USA. With only about three quarters of the state left to film, we'll be done and dusted and back home by the 29th - only 9 days from now! Upcoming highlights to include The Devil's Tower (of Close Encounters Fame)

Our helicopter might, just might, look a bit smaller than this mother of a mothership.

oil refineries, bison, a statue of a fictional animal called a Jackalope, some truly awesome looking mountain ranges, bits of road, some farming activity no doubt, a Uranium mining region (thank god we wear haz mat suits in the helicopter - oh wait), and a raft of other places.

Today though, was about setting up the rig. I attempted to film a timelapse on my go-pro camera system, but I think it failed miserably. I'll see what I can salvage and put together in a minute. All the kit is working well, though we're waiting for a mount to turn up tomorrow morning before we head off and start out shoot!

The kind on the left, not the right.

Montana & Wyoming Day 14 - Deer Lodge, MT to Idaho Falls, ID

WE DID IT!

Bam. Montana = done!

What an awesome couple of weeks it has been, i've had the most awesome of times and am completely drained and knackered. As I write this it's Friday 13th, and we are having a well deserved break. I'm going to update this very soon, complete with pics (there are some great ones), and will fill in all the details.

But not yet. Nope, right now I'm going to chill with a pint of well deserved Bud. What a fantastic journey!

(and it ain't over yet - tomorrow the holiday begins)!