South-east Asia 1980-1986

In October 1980 I negotiated a job with Core Laboratories International Ltd (CoreLab); I met the company representatives in Aberdeen, Scotland and in London and we came to an agreement. I was hired as a field services engineer, I would work on contracts that the company had on oil and gas fields in the South-east Asian region. I would be based in Singapore; I didn’t quite know where that was – at the time I confused it with other ‘Chinese’ cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai. When I looked at a map I was somewhat surprised to find that the city was located all on its own far from China and only just 1+° north of the Equator. 

But my wife at the time had heard from other oil field wives that it was nice there; personally I had no strong opinion about that, I just wanted to work on the rigs! When we collected the airline tickets at the CoreLab office in London 30 October, the destination said ‘Jakarta, Indonesia’ and my X got all worried – that was not where she wanted to go! But we were instructed to get off when the plane stopped over in Singapore, the additional part of the ticket was in case immigration gave us a hard time about only having a one-way-ticket! Of course no one asked, we eased through immigration and got our status sorted out with the help of CoreLab’s HR department later next month, Personnel Department it was called then.  

I flew out of London via Belgrade and touched down in Singapore 31 October 1980, we landed at Paya Lebar Airport; Changi was only opened later the following year, in December 1981. A travel agent took us to Seaview Hotel not too far from the airport (that hotel is long gone …), and I went to the CoreLab office the next day to meet my new supervisor, the regional manager and some colleagues. CoreLab was mainly a core analysis, mud logging and well-site geologist business then, but they were expanding their very profitable field services division at that time and apart from me, a few other field operators and engineers were hired, among those Wong Kim Liang and Wee Yeo Chin – I still keep in touch with those two; in fact, we played badminton together last night (22 Jan 2021)!

Back in the UK, I signed a contract that I would be paid a base salary in US$, technically I was hired by the American company and worked out of Dallas, Texas. I cannot remember exactly what the pay was now, it was around US$1,400 per month; there was an offshore bonus system of course, for each day I stayed away from home that was billed to the client. Instead of an expense account I was given a ‘living allowance’, it was S$2,000 for marriage status (S$1,600 for the single guys). I didn’t know how much that was and I didn’t really care, I just signed on for the adventure and for the chance to work in a different environment with different conditions and geology.  

I was allowed 10 days at the Seaview Hotel after which I was supposed to find a place to stay at my own expense, but I never spent much time house hunting. I took the third place I looked at, and 5 November I moved into Merlin Plaza, as it was called then. Miraculously that building still exists, but with new owners of course, it is just called The Plaza today. I opened a bank account with DBS across the street and 7 November 1980 I sold £1,000 to get some local cash; the exchange rate to SGD at the time was 5.08, as I write today it is 1.82! I got S$2.14 for a US$ when I cashed in my first paycheck, today you get S$1.32. The Merlin Plaza place was just a small studio apartment but it was OK for my wife and me. The rent was S$1,600 per month; I don’t think that has changed much over 40 years! That left me with S$400 out of my monthly allowance that I could use for transport and such. 

The company paid my income taxes for me; since I ended up working in many different countries for various periods of time that must have been quite a puzzle each year, but I didn’t have to worry about that. They also had a health insurance plan; I looked at that one, but there was a co-payment of US$60 per month as well as deductibles and other small print, I thought that was BS and refused to sign on. For a while HR panicked and had to revert back to Dallas HQ to check if I was even allowed to work without health insurance coverage!? But in the end they folded, and I have paid for my own medical expenses, cash out of pocket, ever since. I prefer it that way, it taught me to be more careful about my health, and I also saved some money over time; in general I don’t like to bet against myself.  

After two weeks training on our equipment at the office and the workshop downstairs I was put to work and started out with a job via Jakarta offshore Java, Indonesia. I was gone from 17 November to 2 December 1980; you can see some of the photos I took during that trip below. Then followed jobs offshore Malaysia and then back to Indonesia for various assignments in Java, Sumatra and Kalimantan (Borneo). Initially I wasn’t too impressed with conditions in Indonesia, but the place grew on me slowly as I saw more of the beautiful country, worked with the people there and got to know them better. We had contracts in the Philippines, off Palawan Island, but with client meetings and stand-by time at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manila. I liked the Philippines and found the people there more westernized than in other parts of the region. 

CoreLab had a staff house in Jakarta where I would often stay between jobs on location or for meetings with the Indonesian management. The nightlife at that time, especially in Jakarta and Manila, was a lot of fun; but although I enjoyed chatting with the bar girls I didn’t take it any further than that: I was married and respected my vows. I also didn’t drink much in those days; I would just have a beer or two and enjoy the company of my colleagues from many different places and backgrounds. We had Brits, Americans, Aussies and Kiwis working for us, as well as Singaporeans of course and some expats from Burma and Japan, it was a great cultural mix. All with one serious mission: Get those hydrocarbons out of the ground, stay safe and make money!

In those years I always had a check-in duffel bag and a hand-carry briefcase with my data tapes packed near the door; often we would fly out to a job on less than 24 hours notice. We got some contracts in Thailand as well, offshore Songkhla in the south-east. One place I never visited was Australia. Twice I had a work visa in my passport and was ready to go to Perth to help out with some field surveys on land wells in Western Australia – and twice me trip was cancelled at the last minute! I have never visited that continent for any reason before or since! Although I flew over it a bit later on my way to New Zealand in 1989, I will cover that in the next chapter (1986-1993). 

Around that time, PRC was opening up to the outside work. The Chinese had a striving oil business on land already, but they were weak in the offshore technology, which involved deeper drilling, higher temperatures and pressures and directional wells, going out from a fixed platform in various directions to tap an underground oil field several square kilometers wide. They invited foreign companies to help out with this, and we (CoreLab) were among the first to secure contracts there. My first trip to China, traveling via Tokyo,Japan was from 22 March to 8 May 1982. After that I had some much needed vacation time and did some work in Indonesia. The next China trip with five days in Hong Kong on the way up to get the work visa sorted out, was 22 July to 30 August 1982. After that I had some time off and did some work offshore Thailand. My next trip to China was from 22 October to 26 November 1982 - the China trips were always long ones! In 1982 I was one of the first westerners ever to work in the Chinese oil business. In my notebook from that year it says that I made S$11,146 in Nov 1982, which was good money back then, thanks to the offshore bonuses from China adding up. I was never in this for the money; but if they want to pay me for doing what I love that is fine too; I will take that, thank you very much! These trips to China in 1982 would become the first of many; that country soon became one of the most important markets for our oil well data collection and analysis services.   

Towards the end of 1983 I was getting a bit tired of what I was doing; I had worked pretty hard for three years. I still enjoyed the surveys and the data analysis, but conditions in the field were starting to get to me, especially in China where I was never able to make any friends with the locals. There was a gulf between us; in my view, the place was just not pleasant. I had a colleague from Australia at the time with a different attitude. Between field jobs, in his spare time, he would travel through the country as much as he was allowed, he picked up the language, he loved the place! I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough as soon as the work was over. I think I was the only one of us foreigners who never did a tour out to see the Great Wall while we were on stand-by in Beijing. Why would I? A pile of old rubble? I wasn’t interested in Chinese culture and especially not in the recent Communist history, to me the Cultural Revolution was a social disaster. I was glad that the Chinese society finally opened up a bit, and I was proud to be part of that process, it was just too little too late in my view. 

In December 1983 I needed a break from the field work and I actually quit my job with CoreLab! Since I started in the North Sea in 1975, my goal had always been to retire from work at 30! I didn't quite make it, I was 31 in Dec 1983, but it was close enough. I sorted out my business with CoreLab, collected my last paycheck and 11 Dec 1983 my X and I traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark on SK972. I kept the house at Jalan Dermawan going. We celebrated Xmas and New Year with friends and family and arrived back in Singapore 7 Jan 1984. I was now retired and didn't do much except play a little football and go on a lot of nature walks. I would run up from Hindhede Drive to the top of Bukit Timah hill to stay in shape now and then, it took me 8 minutes. In those days I could spend all morning in the forest and never see another person. People didn't go into nature back then, why in the World would you do that? My X had a business going on Bali at that time, and I was there with her exactly a month from 6 Feb to 5 Mar 1984; more about that in the 'Bali' tab. Other than that I didn't do much during that period, except enjoy my freedom. I drove up to the beach at Desaru (Malaysian East Coast) for a while, and I started birdwatching again; I became a member of the Nature Society of Singapore in 1984, Malayan Nature Society it was called then, they showed me where to go to find good birdwatching spots. But I also kept in touch with my old colleagues in the oil business and that turned out to be a good move. 2 May 1984 my X and I traveled to Copenhagen via New Delhi and Moscow with a stay in Stockholm, Sweden to spend some time with the family and enjoy the Nordic spring. Later in June we flew up to Sola, Stavanger to visit my Dad in Sandnes, Norway. 

Something funny happened on 12 June. I was sitting in my Dad’s living room watching Denmark getting beaten 1-0 by France in the Euro 1984 football tournament; Platini scored the only goal 12 minutes from time, and worse still: My favorite Danish player, Allan Simonsen, was carried off the field with a broken leg. During all this excitement, the phone rang: It was my (former) manager Simon Crook. I said “How in the World did you get this number, Simon??” He said that Jolene, our trusted secretary, had found my mother in Denmark; my mother had told her where I was. Simon wanted me to go back to work for him, this time as field services supervisor, overseeing CoreLab’s Asia field operations. I said OK, and the next day my X and I flew to Copenhagen where we spent the night at my mother’s apartment; she was a member of parliament during that period and kept a small place in the Danish capital. 14 June 1984 I flew Aeroflot to Singapore and started my new job.  

I was supervisor for Corelab’s field services operations for two years. It was a hectic time for me, but also extremely satisfying and rewarding. A few months after I joined the management team, my friend Simon Crook, who had hired me, left the company. Together with one of our senior well testing engineers, Peter, he joined another company dealing in well-site core, gas and oil sampling equipment. My regional manager, Chris Boyce, an Americanized Brit, was very supportive of me, but he didn’t want to hire another manager to replace Simon. Since Chris was from the core analysis and well-site geologist section of the company, he didn’t know so much about what we were doing in field services; so I became the de facto operations manager as well as field services supervisor. 

My first assignment was … to go to China, again! But this time as part of the management team; I met our clients there and discussed our services with them, always trying to do a bit of marketing and secure more jobs of course! Indonesia was run increasingly independently by our Jakarta-based company, so my area was the rest of South-east Asia and China. Our main client in China was a Japanese consortium, JNOC (Japan National Oil Corporation); so while Simon was still around, the two of us traveled to Tokyo several times to meet the big shots there. We flew first class; an ordinary jacket and tie wasn’t good enough, so I had to buy a brand new designer suit on my expense account for the formal meetings! 

After Simon left, Chris hired a country manager for China who increasingly took over some of the responsibilities there; but all equipment and personnel still had to be organized out of Singapore. As supervisor I also traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Bangkok, Thailand to support our sales reps there with technical input; occasionally to Jakarta, Indonesia as well, although Mark Clarke, the Brit supervisor there, did a great job on his own. I worked closely together with our small technical development department in Dallas, Texas to procure and devise new hardware and software for our services. In 1985 I had 42 field personnel reporting to me: From junior wireline operators to data analysts, well testers, mud loggers and well-site geologists. I couldn’t have done it without our field staff off duty; they help me get all the equipment we used serviced, tested, packed up and shipped out. Our tireless secretary Jolene was worth her weight in gold; between us we made field services the most profitable department within CoreLab’s Asia-Pacific operations.    

My glorious career as a corporate executive didn’t last all that long however, as I said: Just two years, although I believe I did four years of work during that period! As I mentioned above, by 1986 I had become interested in nature again and had started birdwatching; I wanted to spend more time in the wild. As you might remember from my student days, I had a perpetual interest in economics, and while making money I tried to keep as much of it as I could. Don’t get me wrong: I have had my share of nice dinners and holidays, cars and even a boat, we only go around once and I believe we should make the most of it. I just abhor downright waste, and I always tried to save as much of my cash as possible and make it grow. I have been dabbling in shares and bonds and other investment products since I was 18, and due to the extremely high interest rates available to us in the 1980s from fixed income securities, I calculated by 1986 that I really didn’t have to work anymore in my life: With a respectable standard of living, income from my 18-22% p.a. bond portfolio alone could see me through. I was financially free. 

As I had done before, I quit my corporate job, and in June 1986 I retired to watch all the games in the 1986 World Cup – that was the year Maradona and his compatriots from Argentina won the tournament! CoreLab was gracious enough to let me stay in the rented house at Sunset Avenue for a while longer. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do now, but 14 June 1986 I walked down to a photo shop in town and bought S$4,500 worth of Nikon SLR equipment; I started photographing birds, just like I did in my youth! I packed up the Sunset Avenue house, sold or gave away most of my stuff – just like I did in Great Yarmouth in 1980! What little was left I put into storage, I wanted to stay in Singapore, I had come to like the place. 

20 July 1986 my X and I flew with SAS to Denmark where we put up with family for a while, catching up with everyone again. Much of the time I spent at my mother’s old house at the West Coast of Jutland, and I revisited Agger Tange (see 1961 to 1973 tab) to hone my bird photo skills; the fall bird migration is really good in that area. 2 October 1986 my X and I flew on a one-way ticket with Aeroflot back to Singapore. I found a small apartment to rent on Orange Grove Road, just behind the junction with Orchard Road. My chapter as a wildlife photographer in South-east Asia had begun.