Thursday, April 27

We had to buy “Visa on Arrival” for $30 apiece. They actually printed out a little adhesive visa, and stuck it in our passports. Then they flagged our packs in the customs scan, and took a look at my prescription pills. Finally we emerged, and were instantly greeted by Carme, our guide for the tour. And the tour began right then. We drove to the post office, and Ray got a bunch of stamps. We drove to the Timorese Resistance Museum, which outlined the recent history of East Timor, which was occupied by the Salazar regime of Portugal until 1974, and then by Suharto’s Indonesia until around 2000. We drove out to a big Christ statue, which Suharto built for them while trying to distract attention from the genocide which Henry Kissinger put him up to when fear of resistance to American hegemony was the basis of foreign policy. Did I say “was”?

And then to Hotel Timor, a pretty fancy hotel by local standards. It had a good ATM so I could get out the cash I needed. It was time to eat; dinner was at “Dilicious Timor”, recommended to us because it was two blocks away, rather than a more elegant restaurant requiring a taxi ride. Go eat at Dilicious. The food is good, and after a while I was picking up a vibe, three butch girls running the show, two guys acting as gofers and not flirting with them, and then at least a half dozen others came out of the back room when I wanted a group photo.

I was sure they were all gay and it was a gay restaurant. Maybe that’s why the recommendation was changed to here, after we asked for a king bed. But then the oldest guy seemed surprised when I said Dave and I were married. People smile too damn much in Asia. It’s like wearing dark glasses, to keep you from knowing what they are thinking. What do I know about gendered behavior in East Timor?

They have more things to worry about. It’s difficult to wrap your mind around what people are thinking in a country where everybody over thirty can remember his village being burned and his neighbors being hauled off for torture and execution. How can they live? How can they forgive? They haven’t even torn down the statues. And that generation is already the minority: the median age in Timor-Leste is 21. For them, it’s family stories, not memories.

And the country is one more stiff and shabby bureaucracy. It had taken an hour to get through immigration and customs, one half empty Bombardier of mostly locals returning from Darwin.

Friday, April 28

Hotel Timor is not quite Turistia. Turistia hotels and venues are a spaceship. Turistia is not off the grid but it is prepared to replicate its functions at any time. It has a generator, it always has hot water, the battle of Armageddon will appear on the in room TV sets as a news feed scroll below grooming advice or possibly scandal from a mixed martial arts fashionista. Hotel Timor does not have hot water, or at least our shower didn’t. The breakfast is pretty good but the steam tables weren’t really hot. Tomatoes and cucumbers were the best, as in many parts of the world. Canned pineapple? And canned orange juice? Wtf, we’re in the tropics. Canned fruits in the tropics always put me in mind of the arrival of the police inspector to Summerisle that starts the action in Wicker Man. And people are using their computers in the breakfast room because the WiFi doesn’t reach here. But it’s quite adequate, the aircon works. The beds are comfortable.

The reviews tell you the roads in Timor-Leste are terrible but you don’t find out until you get out of Dili. The road as far west as the port is good, and passable to the Indonesian border, and the road as far as Baucau is good enough – two lane blacktop – everything else looks like the Highway 84 “before” pictures. That challenge is on top of the usual third-world road usage with motorbikes, tuk-tuks, trucks, horses, fast buses, pedestrians, dogs, goats, cows, and people parked in the road. So we spent about 10 hours driving from Dili to Tutuala, stopping in the middle for lunch in Baucau. You’d better like the journey in this country, because the destinations are relatively speaking just a glance.

In Baucau we ate at Amalia, a lower budget tourist restaurant who seemed familiar with Carme. Every place we stopped on the trip was her friend.

According to the map we drove by a big lake but I didn’t see it. Maybe seasonal?

I thought I might have seen a lynching in progress: a bunch of guys kind of strong-arming a guy into the woods. Revolutions leave a lot of unfinished business, for those who deify Justice. Hence the saying: if you want war, work for Justice. I didn’t take any photos.

Carme drove into a deep puddle in the road and Dave had to get outside to kibitz and tell her how deep the car was sinking. It wasn’t bad.

There was drama when we arrived at the Pousada after dark, a fancy hotel built by the Portuguese, because the power was out in the room we were supposed to be in, but there was another room which seemed perfectly fine so we slept there. Dinner was minimal. Chicken and catsup, veggies, rice, cucumber tomato salad.

Saturday, April 29

I was afraid to go outside the pousada this sunny morning because there was a crowd of children out there. They weren’t waiting for a school bus. They were waiting to sell us beads. This is depressing, when an entire village turns out to sell stuff to the only two foreigners in town. I sneaked around through a side entrance and took pictures of the view off the bluff, and the goats who graze there. The Pousada sits at the top of a hill, surrounded by a walled lawn, and beyond that a forested slope all the way down to the Banda Sea. The goats are well at home. The children kept their distance until I passed some cultural threshold and then they all came up and tried to sell me beads. Eventually I gave them a coin to take their photos. I don’t think they paid attention to what the money was “for”. Timor Leste has one of the lowest obesity rates in the world, and these kids were keeping up their share of that data.

We had breakfast, and started touring. Our driver picked up our local guide and proceeded to a parking lot. There we met two more guides, who had the information on which path led to the rock carvings for which this village is famous. We walked with them as they made hooting noises. The hooting noises appease the spirits who protect the cliff. You may have read that Timor Leste is 98% Catholic. It’s complicated. The churches all have guardian crocodiles on their roof lines.

The trail got worse, but not that much worse. Our guide went ahead with his machete. After a kilometer or so we boosted ourselves up onto a wide ledge where we could see a long coral cliff face, cut with cracks and different limestone formations, and as you approached the face of the cliff, especially near the crevices, you could see where long ago Papuans had drawn pictures, with many of the same patterns seen everywhere that humans have taken up ochre to Instagram their life. Handprints, animals, spirals, dots, some boats. I don’t suppose the pictures were terribly old, especially the ones out in the sunlight. The stone age here lasted until quite recently. There were bees who’d built honeycombs on the overhangs, many of which had fallen off. There were bats flying around. It was quite an impressive sight.

After our archaeological experience, we drove down to the beach, and got in a little boat which took us across to Jaco island. The water was shallow and there were no waves to speak of, just a nice current. You wade about 15 meters into the strait, dip your head and snorkel in, and the current sweeps you past a slow pageant of CGI fish and coral. Lots of dead coral but lots of new, heat tolerant coral. The Great Replacement. We spent an hour there, then went back and continued driving, having lunch in a sprawling area with horrible roads called Los Palos. The lunch place was cute, run by a relative of the driver (of course) and her friends wanted their photos with us. I haven’t succeeded in sending them our photos yet.

We ended up in the village of Com, one place where eclipse totality visited Timor after Exmouth. It was a little beach motel, and they’d given our A/C reservation to someone else. So we were in a basic room with a fan and a mosquito net, sharing a cold shower, a regular toilet, and a squatter, with the other patrons. The sound of the breaking waves effectively covered up the music.

Later on in the trip, a tour guide for a different company told us that Guest House Kati has done this to him, as well — accepted a reservation for a room, but given the room away as soon as somebody else walked in off the street and wanted it.

Sunday, April 30

We started driving back to Dili, stopping to see a little lagoon at the base of some picturesque coral cliffs. We had lunch and an hour of internet at the fancy pousada in Baucau.

We also bought a mystery fruit from a roadside seller, called something like Alifuan. I could not find it on the internet. It appears to be some kind of palm fruit.

We returned to Dili near sunset, where we visited the Santa Cruz cemetery. On November 12, 1991, Suharto’s soldiers gunned over down over 200 protesting students. There were in this case, foreign journalists present, and one of them, Max Stahl, managed to hide his videotapes of the massacre in a fresh grave, and after he was released from beatings and custody, retrieved them from the grave and sent them out of the country with a Dutch journalist. It made a brief splash in the world press, but our president George H.W. Bush upped military aid to the Suharto regime anyway. Indonesia was too important to American oil interests to lose over the massacre of a few students. Hadn’t Kissinger already decided that East Timor and its oil properly belonged to the west?

It was not until the Asian currency crisis of 1997 forced Suharto out of office, that any real progress was made toward ejecting the occupiers. The Pope gave his Concerned Look, the U.N. passed some resolutions, a few more tens of thousands of Timorese died, and voila: a new country. Also there was the traditional post-independence civil war, in the Irish tradition.

I suspect it was not the UN and the pope who liberated Timor Leste. I suspect that the rebel groups were killing a lot of Indonesian boys and making the colony ungovernable and unprofitable. It is odd, however, that the museums and explainer guides do not mention this. Everything you see is the story of a massacre by Suharto’s soldiers of the Timorese people. Fair enough. But colonialists do not leave because they have grown tired of killing. The U.S. killed a million Vietnamese and would have killed a million more, except that the 55,000 dead U.S. soldiers were starting to be noticed. Belgium didn’t mind killing ten to fifteen million Congolese, for which there has still been no apology. It’s only when they shoot back that morality becomes an issue.

You can read the story of the Santa Cruz Massacre here. You won’t learn anything you didn’t know already about great power politics. In the complete absence of opportunity to influence events, history devolves to a gruesome hobby.

Having had a big lunch in Baucau, we didn’t go out to dinner. I couldn’t imagine eating. The hotel was really nice and did our laundry super fast.

Monday, May 1

Complicated morning. We ate alifuan and bananas for breakfast, along with the usual meal here. Rice with eggs.

I told Carme that alifuan was not mentioned on the Internet and she didn’t seem surprised. The whole national language here, Tetun Plaça, is not in Google translate, and the fruit is not sold in stores, only along the roadside. She agrees it’s better with sugar and says honey is good, too.

There are bunches of languages out here. Portuguese is common, English is known. The language out at the end of the island, Fataluku, is a Papuan language unlike the others which are mostly Austronesian.

Rent4U, the most recommended car company which has four wheel drives as well as troop carriers and buses on offer, was closed because of Labor Day. Dave called around and got an answer from someone who said they would send us a car and driver for $300 for two days. Then Carme showed up downstairs. The receptionist came to the door to tell us. We chatted with Carme; the desk clerk overheard and said she had a friend. Carme knew the friend, he’s a guide for Manny as well. And Carme said if everything else falls apart, she’d loan us her car. Eddie showed up. Dave cancelled the first car, after considering that Eddie is a guide, and looks good in his muscle shirt. He didn’t say that, I said that now. So we waited for Eddie to come at noon. He was late because of International Labor Day parades and demonstrations, and off we went to the west, to Baribó.

The hotel in Baribó is in an old fort. It is in a beautiful place (forts tend to have nice views), they serve simple dinners, and everything works. They have a small selection of wines by the glass, which taste alike (ie, not really good — I think they were all mishandled in the same way). At the entrance, where other hotels have the specials board and Welcome Conferees, there is a list of the massacres which took place where we were standing.

Tuesday, May 2

May 2 is World Naked Gardening Day. I’ve never seen anyone observe this, but I thought I’d mention.

I got up before anybody and walked out into the street. The kids on the way to school said “Bomdia”. There is a big concrete monument at the end of the hotel driveway, with the number “27” obscurely visible (better view would be from a drone). It was built by Suharto to celebrate his capture of Timor Leste as the 27th state of Indonesia. Interesting it hasn’t been torn down. Balibó is close to the Indonesian border. The folks in West Timor are culturally similar to East Timor but there doesn’t seem to have been any parallel struggle for independence there. They were owned by the Dutch and have more shared experience with the Jakarta government. Only, they also are Roman Catholic. Freedom of Religion is important to the self-image of the Indonesian government, just as with ours. Only, Islam calls the shots.

I wandered into the local war museum, on the same traffic circle as the 27th state. This one is about five Australian journalists who were assassinated. After a while, you start to notice that all the museums focus on white people who got killed. The tourism department must have its thumb on the scales. When you walk in the door, you see the photos of the young Australians on the wall facing you. On the side walls, behind the door, not lit, are the murdered Timorese.

This is why the Ukraine invasion gets so much press. Everybody being killed is white. The horror. Tigray Province, noise.

At 11 AM our guide showed up with a local guide, Yanto. We drove on a very bad road, walking speed nearly, to the next village over, where there is a school and a tilapia farm and a waterfall. There were no students in the school. If there was an explanation of that I didn’t hear it. The school did not look terribly Wired. Then we walked to the Spirit House, the Uma Lulik, of the family of our guide. Two crones were guarding it. They gave him betel. Yanto says his mother will chew betel nut and make a cross of red on his forehead to protect him. Yanto showed us the flat rocks in the forest where he sacrifices a chicken. Also, banyan trees are yearly honored. Did I mention that Timor Leste is 98% Roman Catholic? The house across the street had a giant Magen David, white paint on a blue wall.

Inside the spirit house, it’s dark. They lit a candle. I was nervous about that because the whole building is kindling. We took a photo with the crones. That was the photo Yanto wanted to have.

Nobody had any lectures to give about the tilapia farm. A bunch of tanks dug into the ground holding GM tilapia. Yanto seemed reluctant to bring us to the waterfall. I think he didn’t trust our ability to hop streams and skid down mud. We’re old. Later in the day he said, that the reason we were attracting attention – among many – is that in his culture, old people don’t go out. It’s true, most of the people we see are under forty, but I figured that’s because most of the country is under forty.

The waterfall was quite a scene. A 14-year-old girl was having a birthday. Her whole village was there, at least those who were under twenty. Or some age. The girl looked about 9. Compare nutrition in Sri Lanka and Timor Leste. Her mom had brought a cake, which Yanto lit, mugging for the phone cameras like Harpo Marx.

When we got back to the hotel, Yanto took us around the block where he lives. More boys, saying Bomtarde. One was the son of Yanto’s best friend since childhood who died young and he got the news in school and was traumatized… I can’t understand him well; his English is not so good and I am deaf. Anyway he vowed to take care of the boy forever. The boy has a t-shirt with his father and grandfather on it. I forget how this came up, but two of the other kids were able to form the Miles Davis mudra immediately on seeing me do it. And so could Yanto. Do they have a cultural affinity for finger puzzles and observation? Most people, including me, you have to teach it to.

As is the custom through much of the Pacific, graves of property owners are often found in the front yard. There was an enormous pyramid holding ancestors who had fled to Portugal and died there during the wars, and Yanto himself has a monument to his grandfather (1953-1999), with a statue, made by his friends. Yanto was born in 1995; his grandfather was in hiding as a guerilla fighter the whole time so he really only knows him through pictures.

Our regular driver guide showed up for dinner when the power went out in town. The hotel has a generator. A lot of other village people arrived then, too, and went home when the power came back on.

Wednesday, May 3

We drove back to Dili today, to catch our plane to Australia. We stopped briefly at a lake to look at a few birds. There was a big structure there that was built to welcome the Pope, and there was a big track where you get tested to get your motorcycle license by driving around pylons. Motorcycles are how people get around.

We allowed a lot of time for things to go wrong, as one must, but nothing went wrong so we were at the airport much earlier than we needed to be. We weren’t allowed into the airport before two hours before the flight, so we sat in an air-conditioned coffee shop along with a few other passengers who had figured out that they could do that. Once we got into the airport, it was a typical airport experience. I even bought an airport gift for downwind friends. Nobody would negotiate prices though. This trip was far too short.