Timor to Bali

Richard W. Frank

Timor to Bali

Being the only travelers in the state, we spent several days in Dili exploring what remained of such an ill reported place. We stood in the rain with myriad locals outside the cathedral to see the 1996 Nobel Peace prize winner Bishop Belo give Easter service. I visited the Santa Cruz cemetery where on November 12, 1991 Indonesian soldiers fired into a crowd commemorating the recent death of an independence activist. They admitted killing nineteen, but locals said it was over eighty.

Indonesia invaded East Timor on December 7, 1975 after the Portuguese left. They felt comfortable letting the outside world in almost twenty-five years later in 1989. Not many travelers had taken up the opportunity, and they averaged well less than 900 a year. The Portuguese influence was easy to recognize from the white government buildings and monument to Henry the Navigator to the sausage drying on our guesthouse's clothesline to the Portuguese restaurant Massau where the rose table wine and fish stew reminded me of an Algarve sunset.

The people of Timor were not sure what to make of the strange white man walking down the street. The children either transformed me into the Pied Piper, scores following me screaming jovially the only English they knew "Hello, meester" or ran frightened to their parents who were not sure how to react either. The Government sure did as I registered with the police in every town and was stopped randomly at military checkpoints. The latter was more nerve-racking as these recent adolescents armed with Kalishnikovs and AK47s, ski masks and dark sunglasses looked more like the rebels than the law. They searched my bags, read my journal with interest, poured over my passport, and tried on my sunglasses. They would always issue me back on the chicken bus with a smile and a wave.

Despite all the hardships that the poor villagers of Nusa Tenggara had been through, they were open, milling, friendly, and as eager to learn about me as I was to learn about them. The litany of questions usually went rapid-fire:

Hello, Meester!!

Where you going?

Where you from?

Ohh, Beel Kleenton!!!

Are you mariyed?

Have you sister or brother?

What are you religion?

etcetera

There was almost everywhere a sense of buoyancy and grace. The ever present school kids in white and red walking down the street to the old saddle bags chewing blood red betel nut between their few remaining vampire fangs. They have a quick smile that is absolutely infectious and can laugh at the orang putih with out making him feel too self-conscious (something that dies quickly here). After the easy anonymity of New Zealand and Australia, I was unprepared to be the exotic one.

With the crisis monetaire foreigners have been staying away, now especially at the end of the rainy season. The hotels were largely empty. The touristy areas I went to farther west felt like there were 50 hungry cats after one mouse. The mouse did have it well off. The prices here are insanely cheap-I feel like Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions just trying to spend money. After a week of the roads in Flores that reminded me of Beirut on a bad day, The Weicicu beach resort out of Labuanbajo was paradise. I had a bungalow with hammock overlooking the beach, three meals, world-class snorkeling kayaks and many other activities for $1.60 a day.

Feeling foolhardy and scorning the luxury ferry, I hopped on a local fishing boat with nine other adventurous souls, six crew and two life jackets on a four day snorkeling and hiking trip. We viewed cautiously the dragons of Komodo and Rinca, got stuck in monsoon rains in zero viz five miles from shore without a compass, listened to one sailor's tape of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, slept on the deck like Haitian refugee, and jumped in the water over some sublime reefs.

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Governor’s Mansion, Dili, East Timor

A Fist Full of Rice

Verrisimo, king of the Latoloho tribe in Los Palos, East Timor sitting in front of me in old khaki shorts, an Hawaiian shirt and flip flops leaned back in his chair and asked me how many rupiah would his house cost in Los Angeles. When I gave him a ballpark estimate, he looked at me, then at Bory his son-in-law-to-be, nodded sagely sucking between his few teeth air was well as smoke from his clove cigarette.

His village used to be rich too before the troubles of the past 25 years. Water buffalo used to so numerous in the area that the groom's family traditionally paid the bride's family 77 buffalo for his fiancé. After the fighting in which the soldiers were ordered to shoot anything that came at them (including buffalo), one head cost $250. This was much more than Bory, a tech school professor in Dili, could afford. With a telling sense of ingenuity, the groom often goes to a copy shop and gives her family a Xerox of buffalo along with some betel nut. "For 2,000rp that is a good deal, no?" On another island the groom puts a stick in a chicken's mouth to look like horns and presents it-"fireplace buffalo." Even a quantity of money is sometimes sufficient-"pocket buffalo."

The last five weeks in Nusa Tengarra—the eastern islands—have been a pastiche of new colors, tastes, adventures, miseries, elations, and discoveries, but I shall remember most fondly the people—local and transient—I have had the good fortune to meet.

I flew into East Timor from the west with three other travelers because the land border had been closed to us. Apparently, an Aussie bloke had helped the Fretelin guerrillas to build a bomb. The police caught the locals. The Aussie escaped, but is to be extradited by the Oz government. At the time I was in East Timor, three soldiers were shot, once in Bacau old several blocks away.

Hugh was a laconic man from Kent who used to have a job in London in the distant past but now seemed to be on permanent, unhurried vacation. He smoke copious quantities of local Kansas cigarettes between grotesquely long and nicotine stained fingernails.

Denny was a young and quiet Queenlander on a five-month world tour that was taking nine months and counting. Peter was a quiet Kiwi from Richmond who was going overland to Europe and had changed his normal clothes to go ""native"" with disastrous sartorial consequences.

Dili Municipal Market

On our way to Komodo and Lombok

After the lot of us had recovered marginally in Senggigi, a friend and I rented a Suzuki Samurai and took off to explore Lombok. The beginning was not auspicious. A traffic accident occurred spectacularly in front of our losmen. We walked to the rental agency where they asked the man (me) to test drive. Having no intention of driving the car, I was forced to experience both my first stick shift in ten years and my first right hand drive simultaneously in the center of town. Cars and I really do not get along to begin with, but I am sure I will find those ten minutes amusing at some distant time. It hasn't happened yet. As originally planned, Jane with no license took the driving and I the navigating.

The trip and the island were fantastic if nerve-racking as dump trucks, buses, bemos, horse drawn carts, buffalos, chickens, dogs, goats, and people all used the same two lane thoroughfare with the zest of a stock car rally. When we did get a flat on a remote stretch of road, I was for once glad for the local attention. Within five minutes four men had shove me off the jack and changed the tire while 50 others looked on giving advice, opinions, gossip, laughs, and stares. We were quickly on our way.

Last night as I walked back to my guest house in the foothills of Ubud Bali, I realized that my last month had been much like a Balinese Borong dance I had recently witnessed. Filled with sound and fury, breaks of peace, good vs bad, comedy and error, impossibly vibrant color, pageantry rife in history, dissonance and resonance, and a happy ending. For the full moon had turned the rice patties a mercurial silver, the palm trees became shadow puppets against a starry blanket, the strains of a bamboo xylophone floated with the incense across the night as a group of subdued gossiping ducks waddled their way through a far patty. Despite all the Aussie tourist madness of Kuta and the cultural kitsch of Ubud, the hawkers, the times that put the ""travail"" in travel, there was still a special magic in this piece of paradise.

Onwards through Indonesia

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