Guest Post: No Holds Barred Zoo

I am fleeing the sweltering heat for the 4th of July. Minnesota bound beeches! To keep you entertained, I asked Husband if he would guest post for me today.  Brace yourself for some crazy oilfield shit.  It amazes me sometimes the stuff he gets to experience.  Enjoy!! (oh and leave some love in the comments.  Its his very first blog post ever!) 

The wife is out of town so I’m commandeering her blog for a day.

At the moment I’m stuck on a rig on Equatorial Guinea (probably will be for another 2 weeks). But I’m going to pass on writing about EG today and go back to a couple of hitches in Gabon. (wifey note: hitch = husbands time overseas, can last between 28 days and 3 months.   Sometimes he forgets that not everyone is fluent in ‘oilfield’)

Gabon is one the French speaking oil countries in West Africa. I spent 2 months there (Nov+Jan) in Port Gentil. In my free time I’d visit this privately owned zoo run by a local guy that owns a couple hotels in the area. The zoo is magnificent. Not because it has tons of animals or anything flashy but because there are no rules.

I’d buy toys every once in a while and drop them off in the cages to see what happened.

Sometimes locals would give the monkeys and chips cookies in the wrapping to watch them open it. The chimps were kind enough to give the wrapper back after finishing.

But when it gets the craziest is when the locals open the doors to some of the cages.

One day someone was bold enough to open the door to the gorilla’s cage. He escaped and climbed over the fence surrounding the zoo. A couple of people (including one of my co-workers) saw the gorilla and started running for the restaurant next door to the zoo. Unfortunately my co-worker was last to the restaurant and was locked out. The gorilla ran up to him and gave him a slap to the thigh. It dropped him and gave him a massive bruise. The zookeepers, not far behind, coaxed the gorilla back to the cage with a trail of fruit. Pretty much just like a cartoon.

And to leave you with one last picture of this magical place…