Sat 3/23/02 12:28 PM

It was 90 degrees in the shade today.

Fortunately, we spent most of our time in the air conditioned sixth car of  the weekly government excursion train to the River Kwai Bridge.

The highlight of today’s 15-hour, $5 roundtrip rail adventure obviously was the bridge, which we were able first to walk across (whilst whistling the appropriate melody, of course), and then to cross while aboard the train. Beyond the bridge was another section of track, the section known as the Death Railway because of the incredible number of lives its construction claimed.

In the afternoon, we stopped at a town the name of which I didn’t catch. Here we drank milk straight from coconuts bought from street vendors and wandered the dusty backroads among a zillion stray dogs. Here also a strange thing happened:  as we browsed in a Video CD store, laughing at the amazing array of karaoke discs available in this desolate Thai town, we espied a monk in an orange robe coming toward the store. After making a purchase (no vow of silence, I guess, for this guy), he crossed the street and hopped into the backseat of, of all things, a waiting BMW sedan. Perhaps there’s something I don’t know about the monastic lifestyle.

Of course Thailand is full of things you don’t see every day. Such as kickboxing, Thai style, which we viewed at the Rajadamnern Stadium on Wednesday night. Thai boxers use very lightweight gloves. But they don’t seem to punch as much as they kick. They also spend a lot of time in a clinch kneeing each other in the gut. All this they do to music that sounds to my untrained ear like something Bin Laden might play in his cave (as distinguished from some other traditional Thai music we’ve heard which is very nice.). Interestingly, they also have ring girls who hold up the round numbers, but they are extremely conservatively dressed; supposedly the Thais are much more conservative than Bangkok’s reputation would have us believe.

The best fight we saw ended halfway through the first round. Red held Blue in a kind of headlock while he kneed him repeatedly in the stomach, lifting Blue’s feet off the mat — just like one sees in kid’s cartoons! — with each powerful upward thrust. After about four such thrusts, Blue collapsed in a heap and had to be removed from the ring on a stretch-frame litter, specially designed to roll right under the lowest rope. This was done in typical Thai fashion, which is to say with stunning alacrity. They didn’t even wait for Ferdi Pacheco the fight doctor to come down and make sure the guy was all right before carting him off.

Speaking of off, Chris and I are off to Burma dark and early tomorrow morning. We plan to spend about two days in Rangoon before traveling north to Mandalay then into China. I do not know what to expect from Burma email-wise, but I’ll write again as soon as I can.

Best regards,

Jeremy

Dispatch #2 from Kunming, China

Tue 3/19/02 8:46 AM

In this Chinese city of 3.3 million, there are few outward signs of communism.

On the contrary, Kunming is a grimy, bustling semi-metropolis teeming with commerce. It has more in common with what I expected to find, and did find, in Hong Kong than with what I expected from Red China.

There is a bank on every corner, and there are people buying and selling things literally everywhere. Even the walls of the pedestrian walkways that cross below busy intersections are lined with clothing dealers. There and in the many bazaars, if you show even the slightest interest in something, the proprietor often will punch the price into a pocket calculator and hold it up it to you. If you frown, he (or more typically, she) will hand over the calculator to let you lodge a counter offer. It’s a simple enough mechanism through which I’ve managed to make a number of transactions, all without need of exchanging a single word.

This is good, too, because hardly anyone here speaks English, and we’ve met only one or two folks whose skills approach partial fluency. We can’t read any of the signs, either. But somehow we’re getting on, and getting around, just fine. We have a map of the city that’s labeled in Chinese and English. When we get in a taxi we point with a pencil to the spot on the map (with the Chinese label) where we want to go. When we want to go home, we show the driver the card from our hotel which is printed in Chinese on one side.

There’s even a Wal-Mart in Kunming — three low-ceilinged storeys of merchandise priced so inexpensively as to make an American Wal-Mart feel like a Rodeo Drive boutique. Pop CDs for $1.25, bicyles for $14, and live eels — yes, live eels, and also some variety of aquatic turtle — for $1 per kilogram. I didn’t catch the prices on the dried fish (that aisle didn’t smell too good, so I didn’t tarry), though I noticed in the aisle-of-hanging-dried-sides-of-livestock (located next to the tupperware and thermos aisle) that for $4 you could buy what appeared to be the better half of a medium-size pig.

Which reminds me, unfortunately, I haven’t eaten yet and must now sign off and go do so. Actually, even if the ingredients don’t look so hot, Yunnanese food itself is quite good. The specialty of the province is a dish called across-the-bridge noodles. There’s an interesting story behind the name that makes the name make sense, but personally I think they should be called across-you-shirt noodles because that’s where the greasy things end up when I try to pick them up with chopsticks.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Jeremy

Sun 3/17/02 6:25 AM

Dear Friends,

We’re now in Kunming, capital of the Yunann province of the People’s Republic of China. We’ll be here only long enough to arrange permission and transportation for the Burma road, then we’ll head out. In the meantime, we’re enjoying spending $12 USD per night for a hotel room and $1.25 USD for all-you-can-eat buffets.

Yesterday we were in Macau was a colony of Portugal from some 400 years ago up until 1999 when they basically dumped it into Chinese hands. It’s now a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, as is Hong Kong, only its ties to the mainland government are stronger than those of HK. It’s ties to HK, however, are quite strong and of a more or less carnal variety.

Macau is to Hong Kong something like Atlantic City is to New York City and Philadelphia. Since about 90% of Macau’s deal is hookers and casinos, and seeing as we arrived on the 9am ferry and departed at 3 in the afternoon, Chris and I missed entirely what most visitors come to Macau entirely for. (The one taxi driver we had in Hong Kong who spoke any English explained to us that one can get, so to speak, more bang for his buck in Macau: “Thousand dollars in Hong Kong,” he said, “no happy. Thousand dollars in Macau — happy! happy! happy! Haw haw haw!” [a grand HK is about $150 USD]).

To the casual tourist’s eye, Macau consists of a lot of overcrowded, substandard high rises and a lot of overcrowded diesel buses filled with Chinese tourists (who are every bit as avid with their picture taking as the stereotypical Japanese tourists, let me tell you). Meanwhile, I had come to Macau expecting some kind of Sino-Latin feel. But other than bilingual signage in Portuguese and a number of mediocre “Spanish colonial” style edifices, I didn’t find what I was looking for.

There were a few highlights. The view across the harbor to the Chinese mainland from the Sao Paulo ruins was, as they say, breathtaking, even while shrouded in mist (the weather’s not been great so far this trip) which imparted a bit of ominous mystery.

On the advice of a German whom we met on the ferry, we ate lunch at the Clube Militar de Macau (special, higher non-member price: 130 palacas [20 bucks]). To my knowledge, Portugal is justly unknown for its cuisine, though the meal we had at the Club was quite tasty and perhaps the best Portuguese food I’ve chanced to eat. I especially liked the pickled broadbeans, which are like super-sized limas with a prominent black streak down the trailing edge.

The most interesting thing we found in Macau was a performance of a Chinese opera, which we stumbled upon on a market side street. It seemed an unlikely spot for such an event, but we rounded the corner and there it was, on an elevated, permanent stage, with a further elevated orchestra pit and bona fide PA system (because, I guess, the gongs and cymbals need to be louder than they already are). P.J. O’Rourke once described Chinese music as sounding like a truck full of windchimes colliding with a stack of oil drums during a bird call contest. The opera had a tinge of that but was altogether listenable, if inscrutable. There was but one other foreigner in the crowd, and we stood beside a pile of stinking durian fruit and watched the show for about ten minutes, thrilled by our first real Chinese cultural experience.

Now we’re in the PRC, but other than noticing that the newly minted currency features Mao (I mean, would the Germans, if they still had their own notes, put Hitler on them?), I’m reserving even first impressions.

Regards to all,

Jeremy

Subject: Dispatch from Hong Kong

Dear friends,

As I travel the world for the next three months, I’ve promised to keep in touch with all of you as much as possible. Please feel free but not obligated to reply to these dispatches.

I arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, rendesvouing (did I spell that right? I don’t think so) with my travelling partner and good friend Chris Robbins, whom I met in college, and who is cutting class for the next month in order to join me here in Asia. We’ve been doing the usual HK tourists things (the Star Ferry, etc.), but being us, we’ve also done a few unconventional things.

We started out by having dinner at the Foreign Correspondents Club with Kin Ming Liu, who runs the Apple Daily, the second largest Chinese language paper in HK. Kin Ming used to be on the editorial side of the paper, where he ran several articles by both Chris and me, carefully translated into Cantonese.  The Apple Daily is highly critical of the Beijing government, and it’s reporters are not welcome in mainland China. Kin Ming enjoys being an unapologetic pro-market radical, however, and we enjoyed hearing is stories and his view that the Brits made a mistake in handing back HK to the PRC in 1997.

Chris, a third-year law student in Miami, was interested in the court system here in HK. Thus we spent this morning in the district court in Wan Chai listening to the case of ???, a young Chinese man who swam here from the PRC several months ago. Upon his arrival, he wanted (understandably) a bath. His mistake was to reach through someone’s open window to steal a bottle of shampoo. He was seen, caught, and arrested. He has plead guilty to immigration charges, which comes with a mandatory 15 month jail term, and says he is not guilty of burglary, the other crime he’s been charged with. Burglary carries a sentence of 3 years, and the sentences are consecutive, meaning the poor guy would spend more than 4 years locked up only to be sent back to the mainland regardless. Sort of a Jean Valjean situation, it appeared; just substitute Prell for a loaf of bread.

Apparently, illegal immigrants are treated this harshly because if they were not (the fear goes) HK, over night, would have more people flooding its borders than it could possibly tolerate. In between sessions we talked to the defendant’s legal aid solicitor, a haughty Liverpudlian who talks exactly (and even looks a little) like Paul McCartney (“Well, your lordship, that’s a rahther serious charge now, isn’t it?”).

Afterward, the prosecutor, a 36-year old Hong Kong Chinese woman wearing a black robe and a white wig like Rumpole of the Bailey, invited us back to her office for a tour of the supreme court. All of this was an interesting glimpse into the HK judicial system.

This afternoon, we paid a visit to Gunnar Moberg, the just-arrived CEO of the just-created Skandia Asia Pacific Ltd., a subsidiary of the company I used to work for. Skandia is venturing forth into the Asian long-term savings market and Mr. Moberg explained to us, among other things, what doing business with the PRC is like. Skandia’s negotiating a business license there. Encouragingly, he said that 5 years ago, when he first went to Beijing to open negotiations, he was meeting with government officials who were uniformly mid-60-year old, party line men who barely spoke English and hadn’t much of a clue regarding financial markets. Now, though, the officials holding these very same positions are 35-year old women with MBAs who speak perfect English. He thinks people will be surprised as how quickly things change for the better and open up in China. I hope he’s right.

Until next time,

Cheers,

Jeremy

And writing about it.

From internet cafes in China and Cambodia, to a shipboard laptop on a Cook Islands schooner, I committed my notes and stories and observations to paper. At the time (and for all I know, still) Yahoo! had a strict cap on the number of recipients an email could have. And so, from March to June of that fair year, the most important 100 people in my life at that time received about a dozen “dispatches” — this is what I called them, and each was headed that way: “Dispatch from XYZ”; for some reason, I was assiduous about headlining them thus, but they’ve all been rechristened more interestingly now, for the retelling.

Anyway, at the end of the trip, I compiled the dispatches, along with The Wall Street Journal article I’d written in New Zealand about some Burmese comedians in Mandalay, into a single PDF:

E-mail dispatches by Jeremy Hildreth
To his friends, relatives, and colleagues
From several locales of Asia and the South Pacific
During the author’s travels through those regions
In the first half of the year 2002
Containing descriptions, impressions and reflections
Of dubious import and interest
But collected here
For your amusement
As originally composed
Typos and all.

In that form, the dispatches have been languishing on my hard drive ever since, for I then got caught up in writing a book proposal about Pukapuka (one of my stops on the journey), trying hard to get an article about the trip published in The Atlantic Monthly (to impress a girl I once met on Nantucket, if you must know), living the Oxford life, and then, somewhat later, becoming a branding consultant and place brand expert.

Which brings us up to date, then.

Now, on their 8th anniversary (if Spinal Tap released a 17th anniversary edition, I can have an 8th), I’ve decided to begin republishing the dispatches on my web site to give them the airing and wide readership they sort of, somewhat, in some places deserve.

Well, let me clarify: I like to act like the writing’s mediocre, but in fact I’m extremely fond of this sub-body of work of mine. It’s fluid, fresh-eyed and from the hip — maybe more so than anything I’ve mustered since — and it got better as the trip wore on. Kurt Loder of MTV News, one of the lucky 100 who got the dispatches in real time, was kind enough to declare: “Whoa. Think you may be singlehandedly extending the Golden Age of travel writing.” (Kurt, if you’re reading this, I’m still grateful for that remark. And if you don’t believe you said it, I can show you the e-mail.)

To my eye today, this is the travel writing of a talented, exuberant beginner. Like the splendid debut album of band with more and better in store, it has unique and unrepeatable charms. It’s cliche to say it, but I really do sincerely hope you enjoy reading these postcards from the East half as much as I enjoyed writing them. (And thanks, Mom.)

The original dispatches were image-less ASCII text emails; I had to paint scenes using my words alone, which was a fine challenge, a superb exercise with some pleasing results (the description of the jetty on the Irrawaddy at dusk, or the recounting of the Phnom Penh prison tour — there are some stellar turns of phrase within). But on the trip, I also took some of the best photographs I’ve ever taken, all shot with an Olympus 35mm “ZLR” loaded for bear (or temple monkey) with Kodak Gold 200; I used up something like 30 rolls, and had them processed by a phenomenal boutique lab in Providence, Rhode Island who printed them on matte paper with white borders…just glorious. This time around — call it a brand refresh — I’ve put in a few photos.

Oh, one last thing: Before I left on the trip, I read voraciously (a lot of Paul Theroux and Somerset Maugham — that sort of thing). One book I remember was Justin Wintle’s 1988 travelogue, “Heat Treatment: The Oriental adventures of an amorous hypochondriac.” The book was okay, but the title was great, and it inspired me (and still makes me chuckle).

Back then, however, I had no inkling of the amorous potentials of travel and I was certainly no hypochondriac. Indeed, I knew nothing of the world, or how to take it in, from direct experience. I was 26. My passport was only two years old. I’d been to about four countries in my life.

But I had time. And the youthful me sensed — and the older me knows it for sure — that when you have time, it’s time to hit the road.

And in those dispatches — these dispatches, I should say, which you are about to read, dusted off and enlivened with photographs — mark the beginning of a vital personal journey as a professional and as a human being. They show me tasting the world, and engaged in the process of getting to know places, for the first time in my life. They show me, I hope, becoming both more myself and more worldly.

Indeed, these dispatches, and the storybook-worthy odyssey that spawned them, contain many of the seeds of my current life. And I treasure them for that.

1. In Hong Kong, a shampoo Jean Valjean
2. Macau confidential: “Happy! Happy! Happy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
3. My first encounter with Communist China: And I’d thought Wal-Marts in America were cheap!
4. Outskirts of Bangkok: The monk, the BMW and the Death Railway
5. Burmese days: The road to Mandalay is paved by 8-year olds
6. Exploring L’Indochine: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Tomb Raiders
7. Singapore: One oppressively nice place
8. Sojourn in Sydney: Surf’s up! Wombats ho!
9. Van Dieman’s Land: The Alcatraz of Empire
10. The Cook Islands, where life imitates Gauguin
11. The South Seas by cargo ship: Have corpse, will travel
12. Suwarrow Atoll: “The only place in the world where there are no women”
13. The gentle giants of Manihiki’s pearl-crossed lagoon
14. The summing up: Around half the world in 88 days

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.
________

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”.

Photo by Juan Pablo Ramirez of me on a broken wing.

In Portuguese times the dark pink pousada we lunched at was called the Hotel Flamboyant. In Indonesian times it was known as the Red House and was a notorious prison and torture centre. Norman Lewis alludes to it in Empire of the East as ‘one of the most disturbing places in the world,’ writing:

Baucau had been the administrative centre of the government forces deployed against the turbulent eastern end of the island, a dishevelled town full of barracks and interrogation centres with high, windowless walls and electrified fences. Baucau had been the end of the road for so many real and assumed supporters of Fretelin, the resistance movement.

Distraught wives searching in other locations for vanished husbands and sons were often turned away with the macabre jest, “He’s gone to Baucau to finish his education,” and with that they understood that their quest was at an end.

Now the pousada is back to offering weekend packages to tourists and expats coming down from Dili, or fine lunches of fish with banana and sweet potato to the likes of me. They even have ice cubes made from pure water.

________

We paid a visit, too, to a spot near – but unfortunately not at – the Baucau airfield where a Russian Antonov transport plane crashed two years earlier, killing all six crewmen and smashing to smithereens the cargo they were bringing which, give or take, amounted to Timor’s entire would-be telecommunications infrastructure.

Because of this accident, the country had to wait a while longer to get its phones up and running. The wreckage is gut-churningly intact. We walked up the wing to the fuselage, which afforded a better vantage point of the children at work on another chunk of airplane, banging and bending, salvaging whatever metal bits they could use back home to make tools for cooking, farming or fishing.

Day 6

We were back on the road before daybreak, passing a box of Froot Loops around the cab and out the window to our friends riding in the truck bed.
Suddenly, the traffic snarled and we came to halt in the middle of nowhere. What’s going on? Someone had set a fire in a trunk knot of an otherwise healthy roadside tree, weakening the trunk and collapsing the tree across the two-lane thoroughfare. The trunk, still smouldering, was set upon by men with machetes and ropes who synchronized their efforts spontaneously and managed to void the tree from the roadbed after about 20 minutes of hacking and tugging.

________

The expansive President Xanana welcomed us with open arms, almost literally. His office is presidential and comfortable, with the requisite big
desk at one end and a living room ensemble at the other. We sat in the living room part drinking [presumably] Timor coffee out of China cups sporting
the Timorese flag.

The president speaks confident but halting English. He laughs and smiles and joshes and gesticulates. Castro-esque in some of his mannerisms, Xanana wins you over – easily. He smokes Marlboros. Timor is lucky to have him, I thought to myself. We covered a lot of ground in our one and a half hours together. The president is keen to see Timorese culture embraced in tourism initiatives, keen to use veterans of the resistance as tour guides, keen that Timor not try to compete with places like Bali in the things that places like Bali are good at.

When we asked him what is the essence of East Timor, he hesitated for precisely three-tenths of a second before answering: ‘The warrior spirit.’ Without a doubt, this notion comes closest to capturing a single ‘core idea’ of Timor-Leste. But we later realised two things about it that make it (in our view) unsuitable as a ‘headline’ for Timor’s identity as a destination: it is not distinctive enough (see Papua New Guinea’s web site, for instance, for all the warrior spirit you can shake a wellsharpened stick at) and it emphasises fighting at the expense of other useful concepts, like winning, as well as non-combative themes (like cultural fusion and a land untamed) that are equally true and alluring.

Photo by Jeremy Hildreth

On their way out of town in ‘99, following the referendum, the Indonesians burned everything down, destroying 80% of the country’s infrastructure (or was it 80% of the capital’s infrastructure? Does it matter? The point is not the proportionality of the damage but the unmitigated madness of it).

One of the torched government office buildings is now known as the Palácio das Cinzas – the palace of the ashes – and serves as testament to Timorese resurgence and indomitability. This is a one-storey building in a two-storey shell. It’s roofless, and reaching the top of the stairs at the first floor gives you the feeling of walking out onto the roof of an office building, only there are walls around you and instead of tar paper beneath your feet there are charred floor tiles and remnants of furniture. The ground floor, however, has been refitted – extremely modestly, it must be said – and houses the offices of several senior advisers.

We drove past a Portuguese building that looked more Greek than Portuguese where the Japanese held Portuguese prisoners during their three and-half-year occupation of Timor (1942 to 1945) in World War II. In Maubara, we got out of the car to make our way through the gates of a majestic (if decrepit) 17th century Portuguese fortaleza by the sea. But it was nothing but walls, within which were a mean modern building that appeared to be abandoned and a UN-origin tent occupied by a kid and his pet monkey. Outside the fort, next to the beach, we bought woven boxes with precisely fitting tops (impressive workmanship at US$1 a piece) from old women with betel-ravaged teeth.
________
Cockfighting, like horseracing or jai-alai (an unlike bullfighting), is a betting game. People have been known to lose their cars in a single bout, and as we pressed our noses to the fence around the pitch many fistfuls of dollars could be seen. The two birds, held by their managers, were made to touch beaks (like touching gloves in boxing?) before being released to square off. Two, three, maybe six whirling collisions of feathers later and the match is over.

Day 4

Looking out over Dili from a populated bluff on the edge of the city, you could see the drowsy, rag-tag town below, the rough-hewn mountains behind and the blue sea beyond. But we hadn’t come up here for the view. We’d come because in the backyard of the house in whose front yard we were standing is one of Xanana’s former Dili hideouts – a place he’d sneak down the hills to for meetings.

It was safe, they tell us, because it was in a heavily Indonesian neighbourhood. Which didn’t sound safe to me, but that’s the genius of it: no one would suspect a safehouse here. Mostly Xanana would stay in the back room of the house, but if the heat were on he had to hide. No problem. They simply prized the false back steps ajar using a metrelong piece of iron rebar and he lowered himself into the revealed hole and crawled down a short tunnel into the small cavern at the far end. There he could remain for several hours at a time, in the dark, or with a candle, in the stifling and all but technically airless pit.

The mother and daughter who own the house (there had been a husband at the time, who died just after the referendum, an event which must have made him very proud indeed) appeared shy and brave. We were asked by our hosts, ‘Do you think people would come to see this?’ Yes, we said. We think they would.

Photo by policewoman Kendelle Clark

Note: I wrote this in 2005; it’s only ever seen the light of day in the Saffron-produced ‘how to sell East Timor’ book I wrote and directed for an identity project in this tumultuous country. But I loved Timor. The country has just celebrated 10 years since its people voted for freedom from Indonesia (a brave move with some violent and tragic consquences). As a toast to that anniversary, I wish to share these notes and observations with a wider audience.

Day 1

After landing in Dili, I shared a taxi into town with two American girls – Peace Corps volunteers on their way back from a holiday. They’d been in Timor-Leste for a year and loved it. I asked if they thought people would come here to visit. ‘Definitely,’ they opined in unison. We then stopped to get money at the one ATM in the country that will dispense cash to foreigners.
________
When the light clicked on I saw him run and I put my foot out and crunched him. After teaching me how to work the A/C, Lino, the bellman who’d shown me to my room, pounced on the cockroach’s carcass, picked it up by an appendage and carried it out with him as he left. In more than a week’s stay, that was the only bug I would see at the Hotel Timor.

At US$135 a night, this hotel – and there is none better in town – is clean and nice but not sharp (for example: there’s an in-room safe, but it’s not bolted down and I had to put my own batteries into the electronic mechanism in order to make it work). But the staff are helpful, the breakfasts are hearty, and Portuguese tarts served at the bar downstairs would be worth crossing a continent for let alone the lobby. For evening R&R, there’s a brilliant black-bottomed swimming pool out back, which is surrounded by meaty dark green grass on which are arranged a dozen pillow-topped teakwood chaise lounges.

Reclining on one of them, you’d have no idea you were in one of the poorest countries in the world (average annual wage: US$400, according to the CIA World Factbook).
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On Lonely Planet’s recommendation, I went to the City Café for dinner, reputed to be a hangout for UN workers and other international types. I fell into conversation with three middle-aged Australian women who had just finished a two-week package tour of the island run by Melbourne-based Intrepid Travel. They loved Timor, too. When they heard that my project involved giving advice about tourism, they asked that I pass along some advice from their experience. ‘Tell them to put up mosquito net hooks in all the hotels and inns’ said one. ‘Oh, and they need better postcards. The ones they’ve got are appalling.’

I walked the unlit streets, anxious but unmolested, back to hotel. The biggest threat, it felt, came not from potential criminal activity but from the treacherous condition of the pavement. From then on, I’d never go out without a torch if I thought there was a chance I might return after dark.

Day 2

After breakfast and a morning meeting, my colleagues and I piled into a 4×4 for a spin around Dili. We requested first to be taken to the Santa Cruz Cemetery, where a peaceful protest became a scene of violent tragedy in November 1991 as Indonesian soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Though more than 250 people were killed, the massacre was captured on film by a foreign journalist. Broadcast globally, it became a turning point in the independence struggle. Santa Cruz got the world’s attention.

The Timorese, however, can’t really understand why visitors have any interest in seeing what for them is a) a place of tragedy and b) just a big cemetery. Frankly, I thought to myself as we walked among the gravestones, I’m not sure I can explain the interest either. Yet I know it’s genuine. It occurred to me at this point how important the ideas of hope and overcoming are to the Timorese story. In some ways, the tale of East Timor is like the Killing Fields of Cambodia but with a happier ending. Something extraordinary happened in Timor – and that’s interesting. And already, on the first morning of the trip, I found myself forecasting that people will come here to experience that.
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We met that afternoon with a presidential adviser who impressed us. He knew what he was on about and also had a handle on the things that made Timor interesting: the variety of ethnic groups in such a small place, the idea of a Christian nation lying at the base of the Asian archipelago, the “point of connection” (his words, as I recall) between the South Pacific and South America. On the latter point, he had two striking observations. The first was the similarity between Timorese tais weavings and Central American weavings. The second was that when he went to New Zealand, if someone from the native Maori population spoke very slowly, he could understand what was being said, so great are the similarities between the Maori tongue and Timorese Tetum.

At Libya’s border with Tunisia and Algeria, Ghadames sits.

Or reclines, in a Bedouin kind of way. Lazily, I give you Lonely Planet:

“There’s nowhere on earth quite like Ghadames, which could just be our favourite place in Libya. The Unesco World Heritage-listed old city is a magical evocation of an idyllic caravan town of the Sahara – a palm-fringed oasis, the sense of an intricate maze, stunning traditional houses huddled together for company amid the empty spaces of the Sahara, and extensive covered walkways that keep the desert heat at bay.”

I think I liked most the post office (see photo above), where a member of departing caravans would search through bags hung on a hook in the passageway to see if any letters were bound for destinations along his anticipated route. And the lookout (see photo), from where someone would scan for signs of approaching caravans; like sailors on a sea of sand, the Ghadamsis wanted always to know what was on the horizon.

* * *

In the carpet-bedecked tent for tourists at the base of the dunes I lie on cushions. Several black men in traditional Tuareg nomad garb tend to tea trays near the entrance, conversing in Arabic (or is it Berber? Or even Tuareg?). Now, for some years I’ve maintained a habit, which I highly recommend, of travelling with old novels set in the place I’m visiting. From my pack I extract 1939’s Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who wrote The Little Prince as his last literary act before being shot down by Germans off France’s Mediterranean coast; he was an aviator with the Aeropostale). At random, I crack it open – you will not believe me – to this passage:

“Then the slave, without a word, fills the stove with dry twigs, blows on the glowing embers, fills the kettle, setting in motion for a girl’s task muscles that would uproot a cedar. He is untroubled. Absorbed in the sequence of actions: brew the tea, look after the dromedaries, eat. March under the burning of the day towards the night, and long under the chill of the naked stars for the burning of the day. Happy are the northern lands whose seasons can compose a legend of snow in summer and a legend of sun in winter; sad are the tropics where in the sweating-room nothing really changes, but happy too is this Sahara where day and night swing men so simply from one hope to the other.”

The weather, on this mid-winter early evening however, is balmy, warmish, neither hot nor cold; I’m very comfortable in a T-shirt and trousers. The tea is sweet, like I like it, and poured from a height so it froths like cappuccino. The bread is hot and fresh, and the sand baked into it squelches against my tooth enamel as I chew.

* * *

In the hotel lobby, I bump into the US defence attaché, visiting from Tripoli with his family for the weekend. I ask something I’ve been wondering all week: “So is Libya all right now as far as we Yanks are concerned?” “We’re still keeping an eye on them.” But assuming the government here continues to straighten up, I think, just give ten years to this expansive, stable, storied, oil-rich and well-located territory of 5 million inhabitants and it will become what my old boss Kudlow used to refer to as ‘a real country’. One of a handful in Africa.

Inshallah (god willing).

Your humble correspondent,
Jeremy

PS  Though I felt surrounded by the mystique of camels since arriving here, the closest I actually got to one, funnily enough, was in the lunch I ate in one of the Ghadames’ traditional houses. If my guide (whose name was Mohammad Ali; he trained not as a boxer but as an air traffic controller) hadn’t pointed this out, I’d have thought it was tender and mild stewed lamb.