Source: GERTIL

Day 7

Leaving my hotel about ten o’clock on Friday, One Last Bar is where I went first. Here I met a UN adviser named Scott who advised me that the next bar to go to was a Brazilian place down by the beach called Exotica. I took a taxi (it’s just outside of central Dili, the club, so the fare was US$2 rather than the standard $1 in-town fare), and as I was getting out I was accosted by kids trying to sell me trinkets covered with flashing LEDs. They were aggressive rather than malicious, but they were RIGHT THERE IN MY FACE and I gently pushed them and their blinking lights aside and went into the nightclub.

Watching the locals and internationals dance, I became aware of two things. One: the lovely way in which people from around the world, military and civilian, charitable and profit-seeking, have come together to help the Timorese build a country from scratch; there’s a wonderful feeling of camaraderie in Timor. I imagine it exists in other places, but I’d never seen anything like it before. Two: I noticed how Latinized the Timorese are in some ways. Sure, this was Brazilian music they were dancing to, but that didn’t create it, it only highlighted something that goes beyond dancing and into language, machismo and other areas of culture and demeanour.

And then I noticed a third thing: my mobile phone was gone. It must have slipped out of my pocket when I was getting out of the taxi, distracted by those kids! Well, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my evening.

At the bar I struck up a conversation with Arturo, a guy from Angola working for a French oil concern who’d come to Timor on behalf of his employer to assess the prospects, petroleum-wise. At some point we decided to move on to the next cool spot up the road, aptly named the Cool Spot. Here I ran into more people I knew and didn’t know.

There was Sean, whom I’d met a few days before at our round table and who publishes Discover Dili (Timor’s answer to Time Out, only it comes out annually), and his girlfriend Sierra, and a friend of his from Ubud, Bali, here on holiday. Sometime later, we clambered into a white van driven by a local friend of Sean’s named Christian. It was about 3am, but there’s one more stop to make: Aaj’s, a ‘post-funking’ (Sierra’s term) watering hole and former brothel downtown.

Slumped on the floor of the van along with several others, I was introduced to Liam, an Irish civil engineer who’d come to build bridges. Liam began telling me about his work in Timor and about the affection he was developing for the Timorese. Basically, he said, they don’t know what they’re doing yet (and why would they?) but they’re earnest and helpful and – this wasn’t the last time I’d hear this – there’s something particularly but un-definably rewarding about helping them. “But wouldn’t that be true in other places that are being reconstructed?” I asked. No, he insisted, actually it isn’t. “But where else have you been?” I asked. I was expecting to reveal his naivety but instead Liam rattled off the names of a dozen of the world’s trouble spots in which he had laboured. Possible further evidence, I noted to myself, that there is something special about the Timorese.

At Aaj’s there was billiards and the Macarena and the Ketchup Song and despite Sierra’s caution about men sometimes bringing guns with them into this establishment, I noticed nothing more odd than unpretentious people having a good time until the very, very, very wee hours.
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In the afternoon, I went to a huge family barbecue on the beach where I sampled terrific grilled beef and sticky, almost crunchy rice made in a bamboo mould. I wasn’t feeling talkative or social, but I enjoyed watching the locals enjoying themselves, kids splashing after blow-up balls in the breaking surf, and Jesus Christ, arms outstretched, taking it all in from his perch on the hill.

In the evening I dined alone on cheap and delicious mie goreng (Indonesian pad Thai-like stuff) in the leafy, haunted courtyard of the legendary Hotel Turismo. Haunted, I mean, by its storied past. Until the advent of the Hotel Timor where I was holed up, the Turismo, dating from Portuguese times, was the international hotel. Every account of the 1999 referendum mentions it, sometimes at considerable length. But the Turismo’s legend predates those tense and turbulent times, and its war stories hark back to even earlier tense and turbulent times. Here’s a sample, from Australian journalist and fervent Timor champion Jill Jolliffe, writing in 1975:

At the Hotel Turismo, a Portuguese poet shouted his poems to the night air and Rita the monkey chattered in the splaying branches of the mango tree. Falantil soldiers who looked like black Abbie Hoffmans drank the copious quantities of “Laurentina” beer bequeathed by the Portuguese and juggled grenades across white linen table cloths.

Imagining in situ goings on such as these made my mie goreng and locally produced Lion beer taste even better. Then, walking home to my new international hotel, I turned in early, for the next day I’d need to rise before dawn for an expensively chartered boat trip to nearby Atauru Island.

Day 8

Somehow in my South Pacific travels I’d missed having a go in an outrigger canoe. Now was my chance as this was the available mode of conveyance for reaching the snorkelling spot a hundred or so metres from shore, just inside the reef.

Setsuko, an adventuresome 20-something Japanese woman also staying the night on Atauru, was joining me. As we left the house, I in my trunks and she in her two-piece bikini, Barry, the owner of the eco lodge we were staying at, hailed us. “You’d better cover up until you’re out in the boat,” he told Setsuko. “They’re very modest here and you’ll attract unwanted attention. Probably they’ll just stare, but they’ve been known to throw rocks”.