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.