Memoirs of a Geologist: Exploring Spain’s Mountains

GLIAG — PETROLEUM ENERGY INSIGHTS

MEMOIRS OF A PETROLEUM GEOLOGIST

FROM LEIDEN TO RIAÑO

( 1970 )

Volume I

Chapter One — Southward

Drs. M.P.T. Chin-A-Lien, MBA, M.Sc., Ing. Geologist – 20th July 2026

Certified Professional Geologist Nr. 5201-1996 (AAPG)  ·  Chartered European Geologist Nr. 92-1996 (EFG)  ·  Energy Negotiator, June 2021 (AIEN)

Principal Founding Partner & Chief Architect, GLIAG N.V.

Golden Lane Investments Advisory Group

Zoetermeer, The Netherlands  ·  Paramaribo, Suriname

www.petroleumenergyinsights.com

FROM LEIDEN TO RIAÑO (1970)  ·  MEMOIRS OF A PETROLEUM GEOLOGIST

CHAPTER ONE

Southward

“Some journeys change your destination. Others change your life.”

There are journeys that begin the moment a car leaves a driveway. Others begin years earlier, in rooms no one would think to call the starting point of anything at all.

Mine began in the lecture halls and laboratories of Leiden University’s Geological Institute, where I discovered, gradually and then completely, that geology was never merely the study of rocks. It was a way of reading the Earth itself — a discipline of patient literacy applied to a text written not in words but in strata, in folds, in the quiet testimony of a single fossil pressed into stone. Every outcrop was a page. Every mountain range was a chapter in a story that had been unfolding, indifferent to human attention, for hundreds of millions of years.

At Leiden I studied under professors whose passion for the subject was infectious in the truest sense — it could not be feigned, and it could not be resisted. They taught us, above every technique and every formula, three disciplines that would outlast all the rest: to observe before we concluded, to question before we accepted, and to let the rocks tell their own story rather than the one we hoped to hear. I did not know it then, but those three habits of mind would remain with me across more than half a century of professional life, through giant field discoveries, through upstream work in distant basins, through boardrooms and well sites on three continents. They began, unglamorously, in a lecture hall in the Netherlands.

In the summer of 1970, however, all of that knowledge still existed largely on paper. It was time, as every geology student eventually learns, to enter the field. Theory without rock underfoot is only a rumour of a discipline.

Our destination was the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain, where six weeks of geological mapping awaited two students who had, until then, known folds and faults chiefly through diagrams. For a geologist in training, there is no classroom equal to the mountains themselves — no professor as exacting, or as patient, as an outcrop that will not yield its structure until you have earned the right to understand it.

❖

Our vehicle was hardly glamorous, and I would not have wanted it any other way. It was a grey Citroën 2CV Bestel, built in 1969, its tiny two-cylinder engine producing rather more enthusiasm than horsepower. On a favourable road, with a following wind and a patient driver, it might reach eighty or ninety kilometres an hour. The gear lever protruded from the dashboard like an afterthought. The side windows folded upward rather than down. Fresh air arrived through a small flap beneath the windscreen, uninvited and always welcome. Every mechanical sound the car made possessed a character entirely its own, as though the vehicle had opinions about the journey and intended to share them.

I loved that little car. It represented freedom in its most unadorned form — not the freedom of speed or comfort, but the freedom of simply being able to go, with everything one needed already stowed in the back.

Beside me, for every one of those kilometres between Leiden and Spain, sat my fellow geology student Willem. He never held a driving licence, so the driving fell to me entirely. But to call Willem a passenger would be to misunderstand him completely. In an age before satellite navigation, before digital maps, before a telephone could tell you where you stood on the Earth’s surface, every successful journey depended on someone who paid attention — who studied the map before the junction arrived rather than after, who anticipated the wrong turn before it was taken. Willem assumed that responsibility as naturally as breathing, and he carried it without complaint or fanfare for the length of a continent.

That partnership did not end at the roadside. In the mountains, Willem became exactly the companion every field geologist hopes for and few are fortunate enough to find. We measured stratigraphic sections together. We debated the meaning of a fold or the significance of a fault trace until one of us convinced the other, or until the rock itself settled the argument. We climbed steep limestone ridges under the weight of our own equipment, and in the evenings, after the light had gone, we prepared simple meals at the campsite and organised the day’s notes beneath the glow of a camping lamp — two young men convinced, in the unspoken way of the young, that the work they were doing mattered. Willem never waited to be asked. If something needed doing, he had usually already begun it.

❖

Looking back across more than half a century, I understand now how fortunate I was — not merely in the mountains we reached, but in the people who made the reaching possible.

There was Willem, whose quiet loyalty accompanied every kilometre of the journey and every hour in the field. And there was Henk Vermeer, the librarian of Leiden’s Geological Institute, who, shortly before our departure, placed into my hands a copy of J. Rupke’s doctoral dissertation on the geology of the very region we were about to enter. It was a small gesture — a book handed across a desk — but it was also an act of confidence, the kind a mentor extends when he believes a student is ready to be trusted with real knowledge rather than a simplified version of it. That dissertation would shape our understanding of the Cantabrian geology before we had studied a single outcrop ourselves.

None of us, in that moment, could have foreseen where the journey would ultimately lead — not only across Belgium and France to the mountains of northern Spain, but across the following five decades of a career spent reading rock in places Rupke himself never mapped: the North Sea, the former Soviet Union, and eventually the Guyana–Suriname Basin, where the same discipline of patient observation would one day inform the founding doctrine of GLIAG itself.

But that is a story for later chapters.

On the morning we left, we simply packed our geological hammers, a Brunton compass, notebooks, maps, sleeping bags and camping equipment into the little Citroën, closed the rear doors, and pointed the car south.

The engine settled into its familiar rhythm. Leiden slowly disappeared in the rear-view mirror.

Ahead lay Belgium. Then France. Beyond France, the mountains. And somewhere beyond those mountains — though we could not have known it then — waited friendships, discoveries, and a way of seeing the world that would remain with me for the rest of my life.

The journey had begun.

TOMORROW

Chapter Two — Through France

From Leiden to Chartres, around Paris and southward through endless sunflower fields, as two young geology students gradually leave familiar Europe behind and begin discovering another world.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

From Leiden to Riaño (1970) is the first volume of the memoirs of Marcel P.T. Chin-A-Lien. These memoirs are based on real events and real people. Some have sadly passed away, yet they remain vividly present in memory. By telling this story, I hope to honour them, and to preserve a small part of a generation that learned geology with paper maps, compasses, notebooks, and countless hours in the field.

Soso Lobi

© 2026 Marcel P.T. Chin-A-Lien. All rights reserved.

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