A hard hat and an orange vest...

Is how I’m choosing to accessorize these days. They match well with my steel capped boots, dirty jeans and hard yakka shirt that just won't die.

The smell of diesel and hydraulic fluid becomes comforting after a while, kind of reminds you of the size of the machine you're in charge of. I tend to find a sense of isolation in personal protective equipment; ear plugs, hard hat, safety glasses seem to soften the world a bit and somehow promote escape to a world of thought and wonder. The noise of the drill rig drifts off into the background and I think of my God, ponder a few verses from 1st Timothy, my thoughts escape to my wife and how much I miss her, one starts wondering about the exchange rate between the American and the Australian dollar, and what will become of the Iraq war and I wonder how many people died from a suicide bomb in a Baghdad market today and is it more or less than will die tomorrow.

The view laid out before me is breathtaking. High Andes Mountains with cloud forest, so named because the cloud lingers in the valleys like some kind of lord of the rings scene. Waterfalls slide over crevices in the rock faces and tumble hundreds if not thousands of metres crashing to the valley floor below, fed by high alpine lakes nestled an equal distance above in the zone where the air is to thin to sustain much vegetation beyond a few isolated clumps of tussock. The sun glints off the corrugated iron roofs of the mud huts across the valley, a firm indication of just how much rain this place gets in the wet season as its not common for a campesino to spend money on things that aren't absolutely necessary.

Families pass each other on the roads on the way to and from the village at the base of the valley where they load their donkeys high with supplies of beans, rice, potato and corn, perhaps a few beers as a treat after a hard day tilling the fields in the rain behind the ox. Each group of people carry a large antiquated AM radio to listen to the local notices broadcast from the small township about two valleys over, as that is the nearest place with a power supply. This is the only means of communication for the people at this end of the valley who live in the primitive collection of mud huts perched on the slopes. The radios remind me of the kind that grandpa used to have in the shed where the mellow sounds of the national program would drift out while he did something as meaningful as tinkering with an old rotary hoe or tapping the lead out of lead head nails to take to the scrap metal dealer. Today is a festival in the village at the bottom of the valley and many of the men have a rooster under their arm to compete in the cock-fight later this afternoon. The union between man and poultry is not easily broken. Many of the men will drink too much and fall asleep on the horse on the way home, or perhaps not make it home at all and stop by the track near the river for a spell while the rooster, tethered to the mans leg by a red rope, pecks at the bugs oozing out of the wet soil. The nightly rainfall may wake him up in time to find shelter, or he may be woken from the mud the next morning by a large bulldozer thundering past.

The valleys are a patchwork of green and more green; the crops springing up in the fields on the distant slopes offer the appearance of the world’s most difficult golf course. The rivers are swollen from the end of the wet season rains and the tranquility of the valley makes you wonder why all that water is in such a rush to get somewhere. In actual fact it is headed swiftly to the Rio Chotano, which will eventually meet with the Rio Amazon, make its way past Columbia across the border to Brazil and emerge on the other side of the continent where after about 200km of travel into the Southern Atlantic Ocean that same bit of water will for the first time meet with some salt and become part of the liquid blue that surround our humble home. I sit down by the river while waiting for my equipment to equilibrate in the cold murky water, write a prayer on a rock and launch it into the torrent. The splash is swept away in a millisecond. In the distance I hear the reversing alarm of some earthmoving equipment which has been replaced by a device that plays the first line of the Lambada tune every time the driver shifts into reverse, instantly reminding me of where I am and the work I need to continue doing. In a few days, God willing, a helicopter will land and take me back to the traffic and heat of Chiclayo, followed by the craziness of Lima and the warm embrace of a wife.