Seven Hundred Days in the Jungle: The Life of an Engineer in Papua New Guinea and Other Stories

What happens when a Latvian-Australian engineer trained in the steelworks of Port Kembla is dropped into the jungle of Papua New Guinea with a mission to bring order to a project others have been unable to complete?

By the time Vid Vidins turned forty, he had built a successful career in Australian heavy industry. He'd worked on major construction projects, studied engineering and project management, and learned how to complete complicated projects on time and on budget.

Then came the greatest challenge of his career - a senior role on the Ok Tedi mining project in the remote Western Province of Papua New Guinea.

The work site was hot, wet, isolated and unpredictable. The rain came almost every day. The road to the mine twisted through the jungle. Machinery was broken, documents were missing, equipment had been abandoned, and the workforce was drawn from Papua New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand, Canada and America.

For Vid, the challenge was not just technical. He had to manage men who did not share the same language, assumptions, training or culture. He had to learn when to lead, when to listen, when to improvise and when to stand his ground.

This is a memoir of remote engineering at its most raw - part adventure, part cultural collision, part portrait of a vanished working world.

It is also the story of a man shaped by displacement, hardship and discipline finding himself once again in unfamiliar territory and discovering that the only way to overcome the chaos is to build something worthwhile.