A Vancouver man may be on his way back home from a work assignment at the Sochi Olympics, days after blogging about Russian red tape, $75 for a couple of small pizzas, a filthy hotel room with muddy water and no hot showers and a two-hour commute.

But the biggest concern for Johnnie Balfour is that he worried he wasn’t going to get paid.

Balfour, who was part of the construction crew for the courses at Cypress Mountain for the 2010 Winter Olympics, blogged earlier this month that he had been invited to help build the Sochi tracks for the 2014 Winter Games that start next month.

“So I’m off to Russia!” he wrote.

The next entry on his Tumblr blog, dated Jan. 21, from Balfour, an ex-Australian soldier who now lives with his wife and baby in Vancouver, is much less enthusiastic. It included a video of his accommodations, “which really doesn’t show how bad this place is,” he wrote.

“The toilet flushes muddy water, there is no hot water, the shower floor is covered in dirt and mud, there was p--- all over the toilet, the water is undrinkable (it’s brown), it’s even sketchy to brush your teeth in it, and the idea of having internet in this place is a joke.”

Welcome to The Province! We're noticing a lot of visitors from Reddit and Drudge Report today. Here are some other recent stories you might be interested in:

Mayor claims there are no gay people in Sochi

Is it safe to eat the sushi? Answers to your questions about Fukushima radiation

How to speak Canadian: 9 terms that confuse the English-speaking world

But the post, that went on to describe troubles with getting his accreditation, negative descriptions of the resort and worrying disputes over payment for the work he and five others were flown to Sochi to do, disappeared from his blog the next day.

“I’ve been told to shut up,” Balfour was quoted as saying in The Australian newspaper on Friday.

The blog was captured before it was deleted and posted to the alpinezone.com online forum.

In a later posting, Balfour wrote the snow has started to fall and the alpine events at Sochi should go on without a problem.

“There is plenty of snow on the mountain and the course will be ready and will be amazing,” he said. “There is a group of very talented people working there and it will be fine.

“I do stand by what I wrote and it is a 100% true account of what went down and what I observed in my first few days,” he added.

”There is most definitely more to come. I have been keeping notes and there is plenty more for me to write about.”

Balfour didn’t return tweets or emails but a friend who contacted The Province about his blog said Balfour was flying back to Vancouver and was expected to arrive Sunday.

Balfour had been hired months ago by the Sochi 2014 organizing committee to build the skier-cross and boarder-cross courses at Rosa Khutor, the ski resort built for the Olympics.