Yep, I remember it all like it was just... last month!
We had to stop a couple of times on the Keylong-Khoksar section because the road was blocked by a JCB (or Tata equivalent) pulling HUGE blocks of rock out of the side of the cutting. Members of the road crew were standing right underneath the jaws of the digger, using giant crowbars to help prise out the blocks, leaping sideways at the very last second to escape tons of falling rock. Bonkers! Wearing flipflops and no helmets too. In fact the only 'safety' equipment they had were hankies tied around their faces as breathing masks, because the air was just a huge cloud of diesel fumes and mica-dust. We were a healthy distance away from that action, but right next to us there was another group of workers (in flipflops) swinging heavy pick-axes to smash the huge blocks into more manageable chunks which could be lifted onto a lorry. With every swing of a pick-axe, lumps of rock would fly off and hit shins & feet, and smaller shards would explode past our faces. I can't imagine what their life-expectancy is, and they do it all for a wage of about 10p per day.
