East Timor

The beach behind the Jesus statue at Dili ... inevitably called the Jesus' backside beach by some droll wit

As we started, so we continued, hitting the sack late and waking bleary-eyed at 5am with less than 5 hours under our belts! In the pre-dawn light in a soft Darwin rain we got in a taxi to the airport and, after the usual airport things, we were off – off to Dili and off to sleep.
To avoid giving a running commentary of my sleeping patterns I can summarise by saying that I had some of the deepest sleeps in a very long time over the next 36 hours and my drawn face, cloudy eyes and dark-ringed eyes became, if not the picture of health, something more approximating a normal being.

Being back in Dili was a nice start to the journey, a familiar place to recuperate. We didn't do much of much, spending the almost three days we were there walking around town and out to the beach area, swimming, lounging around and talking with Pedro's family at Vila Harmonia, the ramshackle famous guesthouse in Dili that harboured foreign activists and journalists during East Timor's long occupation by the Indonesians. It was really nice to have chats with locals, catch up again with Iqu, who we went to Mt. Ramelau last November and meet his wife and newborn baby.

After two nights in Dili we headed to another familiar place, Barry's Eco-resort across the water on Atauro Island, a lovely, low-key, permaculture-inspired place on the water, spending two days and three nights there. We had the opportunity to go diving on the west side of the island, just off the village of Adara, to where we'd walked, then snorkelled, last year. There's a shallow coral reef immediately off shore then a big vertical drop-off going down maybe 50+ metres, so we had two lovely dives in 30m+ visibility water exploring the coral walls.

We left Barry's at first light, on lovely glassy water, and watched as the day began and the sun rose – and the water chopped up out in the middle! - arriving in Dili in time to get the minibus to Kupang, a 13-hour trip heading west along Timor's north coast and then, once in Indonesia, through the coastal mountain ranges. East Timor appears to have a thriving road construction industry, or more accurately, road destruction industry, that appears to be reducing Dili's appalling roads to appalling tracks and ditches. They've made better headway along the western road, with conditions much better than when I went along it 3 ½ years ago, but it is still largely pot-holed, bumpy and narrow and the travelling isn't particularly salubrious in East Timor's vehicles, which generally show the effect of years of over-loading and under-servicing.

Despite all this, it was a relatively comfortable journey to the border, where we got through with a minimum of fuss and, once on the Indonesian side, where the relative prosperity was immediately obvious, the roads were immeasurably better. The downside of this was that, whatever the madness of driving styles and tactics in East Timor, vehicles and roads are so poor that, unless you're in one of the sadly frequent vehicles that top off the side of a cliff, the consequences are likely to be little more than a ding and a cricked neck. On West Timor's far better roads, speeds are higher but driving skills are not, so there's an added dimension of impending doom to the driving experience that would be familiar to most people who've travelled by motor vehicle in south-east Asia.

We did arrive safely after a lovely day of lovely scenery and lovely people – even the border officials wanted to strike up a conversation! If there's anything that's stood out over the last week, it's been the friendliness and openness of most people we've met.
We've learnt some basic Indonesian, which we were pretty keen to practice, and it's been great being able to interract, in however a limited way, in people's own language. After many years of falling off the language-learning horse, I finally got back in the saddle learning Irish with the Pimlseur method and my old enthusiasm for languages came back, and with that the ability to learn!
If I were to recommend anything for learning the basics of a spoken language quickly and thoroughly, I'd definitely say go for the Pimsleur audio method and read this language blog http://www.fluentin3months.com and take to heart its primary advice – speak from day one!

This morning, courtesy of our lovely couch-surfing host, Arin, we've navigated the maze of Indonesia's Pelni ferry company and booked and bought tickets for the three-day trip from Kupang to Surabaya, leaving this Saturday. In the meantime, we'll be hanging out in Kupang, getting our Indonesian better, meeting more locals, going swimming in the Crystal Cave and on some of Kupang's sandy beaches as well as some diving.

So, in short, all's well!