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”.

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.

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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.

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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.
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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.
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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.