Maubara, Classes and a Canadian Lodge

Hello fellow adventurers, lots has happened since we last spoke, so this could be a big one. Though maybe not as many photos as last time, as photos take about 10 minutes each to upload, which is a pain.

Our day to day activities are pretty much the same as last week, we are still doing our language classes four hours a day and organising accommodation, licences, contacts and sorting out things for work in the other hours of the day. Which doesn’t sound like too much, but everything happens at a slower pace In Timor, it’s called ‘Timor Time’. Nemo loves ‘Timor Time’ and has settled into it perfectly, she walks at half the pace that she used to, just as the locals do, and when we go for bike rides I’m afraid that she is going to start rolling backwards she goes so slowly!

Language classes are going well. I’m not sure if I mentioned it last week but the AFP (Australian Federal Police) had booked up basically all the good Tetun teachers in the city for a massive training program they are running with their staff, so for the first few days we were underwhelmed by the tutelage. But on Thursday we got a new teacher, Louisa, and she is amazing! I felt like I learnt more on the last hour of Thursday with her than I did in the 12 hours from Mon-Wed. It is still really difficult, but I think we are getting there slowly, well I am anyway. Nemo is flying, she doesn’t like it too much but I make her do all the speaking when we try and go somewhere or do something. Like today we had to hire a bike, so she did all the negotiating in Tetun, she doesn’t think she is very good, but she got it for $10 when two minutes earlier I spoke to them and the best I could do was $20. 

There is a coconut stand right out front of class, so breaks are usually refreshing! This was my first cocnut

Classes are good though, challenging but good, who would have thought that learning a new language would be so difficult?? Though we do a four hour block each day just gets a little draining. It is hard work getting your brain into getting a grip on the grammar, vocab, spelling, sentence structure and remembering it all to a level where you can first understand the question and then reply. It is especially hard with Tetun, as it has only ever been a spoken language. It has been around as long as Timor’s local people have been here, 100s of years most likely, but every district has their own dialect, which has slight variations and none of them were ever a written language. That’s partly because no one ever had the need or ability to write and Timor has always been a country governed by someone else. When the Portuguese were here, Portuguese was the official language, when it was under Indonesian rule people were made to speak Bahasa. It’s only since independence in 1999 that people have spoken Tetun in the streets of Dili. That makes learning it difficult, while it is all written down now it is only that way so that it can be taught to all the foreign aid workers and UN personal that have been coming into the country over the last decade or so. That being the case, the spelling is inconsistent between teachers and texts, words have various meanings depending on who you speak to signs around town are all either misspelled or no one told them that their districts spellings isn’t the new official version.

I thought I’d give you guys all an update on what’s going on over here and why we are still in Dili and will be for another two and a half weeks. The parliamentary elections are on the 7^th of July and although no one is expecting trouble (UN, NGOs, locals ect ect) our organisations have decided that it’s just safer to have all the volunteers in one place (Dili) just in case the worst happens. Again, no one is expecting anything to happen, but that being said, 2006 wasn’t that long ago, so better to be safe than sorry. The elections are quiet unusual in the fact that everyone has to go to where they were born or first enrolled to vote. So if you were enrolled in one of the far flung districts that takes upwards of six hours to get to by car on a dodgy road, (say for example Same….) then you need to get yourself out there, at your own expense to vote in the election. Being that it is on a Saturday most people will take the Thursday and Friday off work to travel back out to their homes and a lot of businesses will shut down for the weekend in Dili. As a result we are expecting Dili to be fairly quiet. In fact it’s likely not going to be the election weekend that anything happens, if it were to happen it would more likely be later the next week as the results start to come through. So that’s the reason we aren’t heading out to Same until the 16^th, a week after the elections. Beginning next week Nemo and I will be starting work for our organisations, but in their Dili offices, getting our heads around what work they are doing in country and what our roles might look like when we get out to the districts. We are both really looking forward to that!

I’m not sure if I have said it before, but the country is soccer mad! Over the last few weeks the European championships have been on and the country has been watching every game. Having strong ties to Portugal there have been a lot of people losing sleep staying up till the wee hours of the morning watching the games. When Portugal won their game last week, what seemed like all the men/boys in the city decided the best way to celebrate would be to get on their motorbikes and scooters and do bog laps of the city/suburbs revving the bikes and tooting their horns as loud as they could……at 4am. There are also a lot of Spanish fans in country as well, so things got pretty loud the night that they won. I’m looking forward to tonight when Spain plays Portugal………. I have been wondering whether they would be louder if they won and they get to celebrate or if they lost and they wanted to take out their frustrations by rioting in the streets. I guess tonight I will find out, either way the game goes, it’s gonna get loud!

That’s enough serious stuff. On Sunday we went on a little day trip out west to Maubara. Liquica is the district just west of Dili and Maubara is a town in that district. It took about an hour and a half to get there by car. The Red Cross were kind enough to organise the trip, a driver and a car to get us out there for the day. Paul (one of the other vollys), Nemo and I headed off just after 10am. The drive was pretty amazing, the countryside is stunning, very similar to Dili but it was good to get out where it isn’t so congested and it’s far more rural just outside the city limits. Straw type huts, fishing villages and wild animals mostly boars and goats, everywhere. It took about 90 minutes to get there, it couldn’t have been more than about 20 or 30km but the roads are just so terrible that you cant go very quickly as you are forever dodging potholes or on a dirt road. The scary thing is that the lonely planet said that the road to Maubara is one of the best district to district roads around, so ill be interested to see the one from Maubissi to Same, which is apparently one of the worst!

The drive was defiantly worth it though as there is an amazing Dutch fort in the town; it’s the main exhibit really, that and the markets anyway. During the Portuguese occupation the Dutch took the town and built the fort, which still has a few ornamental cannons sitting on the walls that strand three or four meters tall.  It’s been kept in really good condition and is now a touristy type restaurant, so we had lunch there and made the most of the shaded eating area.

The cannon overlooking the market and the bay

King of the castle!

The market

After that we went to the beach (which is across the road) for a bit of a snorkel. Nemo got me a mask/snorkel and flippers for my bday so I was keen as to give it a go. But when we got there, there were heaps of kids on the beach playing and being a little paranoid I decided that not all of us should go snorkelling at once because that would leave all of our things unattended. So I took first watch while Paul and Nemo went for a swim. After about twenty mins Naomi came out to relive me. I had a really good time snorkelling, saw some fish, saw some coral and had a good splash around, but when I came out of the water I saw that Naomi had made a few friends, a few dozen friends. They were all sitting around her in a circle, they were practicing their English on her and she was practicing her Tetun on them. She was a massive hit, the loved her, especially the girls. They all spoke pretty decent Tetun and it turned out they were all from Dili out at Maubara for the day just like us. We got a few photos with them, headed to the markets quickly so Nemo could satisfy her retail cravings and we headed back towards Dili.

Kids playing on the beach

Nemo and her mates

On the way back we stopped in downtown Liquica. Or what is left of it…. I don’t pretend to know anything about what happened there, but the part of town the driver stopped in for us to get out and have a look around looked like it was hit pretty hard when the Indonesians left and it hasn’t ever really recovered or been repaired. A lot of derelict buildings, toppled structures, broken fences and the like. If it wasn’t for the hundreds of children running around the streets I would swear that no one had walked through the town in ten years. Naomi got a bunch of photos of the town, it is stunning, in its own way.

Paul and I

A kid in fluro running across an old run down soccer pitch

We have been finding time for a bit of exercise here and there. Doing a few little runs in the afternoons, which is nice being that it is along a beach, but it can get a little dusty/smoggy running along the roads in the centre of the city. Being that it gets much nicer as you head away from the city we planned out a pretty awesome work out for last Sat morning. We rode just over 7km to Areia Brunka, locked the bikes up, ran another 2k ish to Christo Rae, ran up the 300 odd steps to Jesus, then turned around and went all the way back. Though we did stop at Areia Brunka (the place where I have my feet up on the chair sitting at the beach) for breakfast on the beach and a coffee on the return trip. The place where we ate is apparently known as ‘Melbourne Café’ as it has Melbourne quality coffee, but Melbourne prices. Which we found to be true, cracking coffee, but $3 and considering you can have lunch and a drink for less than $3 dollars if you know where to go, it is a little steep for a coffee, though much better than the $5 you would pay in Perth.

After that we went for a trek to Timor Plaza, just to have a look around at the western shopping mall in the middle of the poorest nation in Asia. It was like stepping through a portal back into Australia only all the shop keepers were Timorese and all the shops were empty…… You can find anything you want there, all at Aussie prices. The only thing is no one in their right mind is going to pay $85 USD for a Billabong shirt when you can get a no name shirt for $1 at the market and a rip of Billabong shirt for $5 in Bali. I suppose the Plaza has its purpose, catering for the tourist or foreign consultant with too much money that is too lazy to go find the local equivalent at a local price. The only flaw in the plan is that Timor isn’t exactly tourist central, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the place closed down after the UN and all the money it brings in through staff and needs goes with it.

The plaza has everything! Including dried fish skeletons. Just thought you should know in case you have a craving in the middle of the night and need to know where to get some!

After we stepped out of the Timor Plaza portal we headed to our local expat bar for some really expensive beer and my dose of sport. It was awesome, 7 different TVs, all with sport on them and waitresses that bring beers to the table, heaven! We got there just in time to watch the Australia v Wales game. Hi Stuart J . While that was on so was the Bulldogs v Brisbane game. They both finished at the same time, luckily straight after I saw NZ massacre the Irish and the pies get over the line against the eagles. I feel dirty even doing it, but it’s the only game of the year I will let myself go for the pies…… In the end it didn’t really matter who won it was a cracker of a game. Then after that the main event, the Bombers and Dockers. Again a great game, both teams had a crack at it, but the bombers put their foot down and pulled off a great win. Hi Jay J. If Jobe isn’t leading the votes at the half way point of the season in the Brownlow I’m not sure what’s going on. The only thing that left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth was that in all the last 10 or so years, that I have lived in Perth and had money to buy a ticket to the footy I have gone to every game the bombers have played in WA that I have been able to and I have never seen them win. The won in 2005 in the final against the Dockers, but I couldn’t get a ticket (and it wasn’t for lack of trying), they won in 2009, again against the Dockets, but I was stuck in Kalgoorlie and they won in 2012 (poor Dockers) and this time I was in Timor. So while it was good to see us finally get a win in the west, it felt funny watching it being played at Subi on a tv screen…..

Back to Timor. We finally got some word on a possible place we might be able to live when we get to Same. Nemo and I have been wondering what our accommodation in Same would be like for months….. Will it be a tree house, a mud hut with a straw roof or a Portuguese hotel? Well it turns out that it might be a wooden Canadian Lodge. That’s right a Canadian style, wooden ski type lodge, nestled up in the jungle of Same. We aren’t sure just yet what it might look like or anything really about it but it is a pretty exciting idea, especially seeing it’s not at all like a mud hut! Apparently people who have stayed there (it is currently being used as a guest house) say it’s amazing and one of the best places to stay in Timor, so watch this space!

Well that’s it for this blog entry, I know that was epically long, but a lot of stuff has happened in the last week, maybe I need to start blogging twice a week. I didn’t even include the saga that was the licencing centre trying to get my drivers and motorbike licences, a story for another day perhaps. Just quickly, one more thing, I almost forgot. The markets here are all really good, especially the second hand clothes markets. Nemo had been wanting to go for ages and she finally had an hour spare this arvo and managed to get down there. She said there were heaps of bargains, she got 4 shirts and a dress. The tops were $1 each and the dress $5.

One last thing, while writing the blog tonight I found out that my uncle Geoff passed away this morning. He was diagnosed with Cancer about 18 months ago and has been fighting it with all that he had since then. He smashed the original estimates the doctors gave him and fought right up until the end. Last year I ran in the Perth HBF Run for a Reason to raise money for Cancer Council WA in his name and many of you gave your hard earned for a good cause. That ignited my love of running and I will always be grateful to Geoff for that.

I was lucky enough to get over to Victoria last year around ANZAC day to see him as I thought that it might be the last time I would see him, which sadly it was. Three weeks ago my brothers, Dad, Julie, Nemo and I had planned to drive down from Canberra to see him for the weekend, but we had to cancel when a few of us were sick as we didn’t want to pass it on to Geoff. Although it deeply saddens me that I didn’t get to see my uncle one last time, especially only weeks before the end it means I will always remember him the way I last saw him, ANZAC weekend 2011, fighting fit, beating the odds, carefree, smiling and full of life.

My thoughts and prayers are with his wife; my Aunt Kary, the boys; Justin, Jeremy and Thorin, all our family, anyone that had the privilege of knowing him and especially his brothers; Uncle Laurie and my dad. Your brother and my uncle was an amazing man, we all loved him dearly and he will be sorely missed by all.

R.I.P Uncle Geoff

Ben

Development Boy and Capacity Girl!

19-6-12

Di’ak ka lae?

That is “How are you?” in Tetun. Hopefully you are as well as Nemo and I. We are having our ups and downs, today is defiantly an up, after 6 days, 2 food markets, 3 supermarkets and countless corner stores we finally found ice cream!!!!

It was a very tasty reward for 2 days of hard work at language classes. The first day was ……overwhelming, we got hit with half a dictionary of vocabulary and it hurt my brain trying to remember even a fraction of it. But today was a little better. We know a few greetings, how to order food, name various body parts and finally my name means something in another language!!! I have always been secretly jealous of people like my brother Jack, whose name can be used in everyday language, must be an attention seeking thing I guess. You can jack up a car, get car jacked, there are four jacks in a deck of cards, you can be a jack of all trades and you can even jack off if you are so inclined. In Tetun ‘ben’ means juice, and ‘susuben’ means milk. Apparently in a few languages ‘susu’ means breast or boob, so susuben translates literally to breast-juice…or milk!

It hasn’t been all hard work though, mostly, but between the frustration and confusion of trying to learn another language there has been a few slices of humour. For example Naomi and I have had to pretend we are married for the sake of cultural norms and Nemo was asking our teacher how to say “Will you marry me?” to the teacher, so that she could ask me as a bit of a joke. But she had forgotten or didn’t pick up on the fact that when said in that way the words marry and sex are the same. So you can understand why our teacher looked more than a little confronted and embarrassed when in front of the whole class Naomi asked him if he wanted to have sex with her, embarrassing for her and him, hilarious for the rest of us.

Either today or yesterday we have both been to our individual NGOs Dili offices. Not for a days hard work, but mainly just for a meeting with the staff and to get a better understanding of what they do in Timor and how they go about it. Both of us found it really good to finally get a look at what we will be doing and what level of resources they might have to work with. Obviously these were the Dili offices and are in all likely hood much better equipped than the offices in Same, but it was a good start. It was a strange feeling leaving the hotel and then walking into the office for the first time. Not  knowing anyone (we have actually both met our bosses once before at a dinner last week, and they are amazing, but both of us got to work before our boss did), not speaking the language and not having been there before, it felt like being a kid rocking up to a new school in a foreign country, a little nerve racking to say the least. To commemorate the first day at the new job Nemo decided we should take photos of us in our work get ups, full of nerves and excitement. She called us, Development Boy and Capacity (building) Girl!

That’s enough of the work stuff, you all probably want to hear about the cool stuff we have been doing! We bought ourselves some wheels!

Seems like the best way to get around, well the most cost efficient anyway. We got a pretty good deal, we got the bikes, helmets, front & back lights, bells, locks, puncture repair kit, bike pump for $300 each. Which is a pretty sweet deal, considering they have shockies, do sweet jumps and awesome bells shaped like a soccer ball with a foot to kick it!

We have already got a pretty good amount of use out of them. On Sunday we rode them out to Christo Rei, where the Jesus statue is, guarding the coast. Apparently the statue itself was a gift from the Indonesians in 1996 and stands at over 27m tall! It is MASSIVE.  The cape that it sits on was about a 25 minute ride from where we are staying in the centre of Dili, that said Nemo doesn’t like to ride as fast as she can, she much prefers the ride really really really slowly and take in all the sights. But it was a pretty good ride.

Here is Jesus on top of the hill

A close up of the big JC

And a pic of a frog playing a saxophone in front of a cactus with Jesus in the background

We were actually trying to find a shortcut over the hill (as opposed to the 2 hours it takes to ride a pushbike around it) to get to ‘backbeach’, the beach behind the statue. Apparently it is quiet, has white sand and pretty decent snorkeling. We didn’t find the shortcut but did take the opportunity to climb the 1 million steps (might not be a million but surely had to be well over 9 hundred thousand) to get to the base of the statue. Did I mention how steep the steps were or how slowly Nemo likes to walk/ride/climb as she takes in the sights? Steep and slow respectively! We both struggled up them a little, lost a fair bit of fitness drinking and eating our way across Canberra and Dili over the last month. It was well worth the climb though, apart from a few shady looking characters at the top, who for just a second might ask to borrow and not give back our camera. The view was stunning. Here are a few pics

Half way up the climb

Finally at the top!

Dili is around to the right, and back beach on the left

We were so knackered we decided that we needed a beer, half way back to our hotel is the beach bar that we sat and had a few beverages at sunset the night before, so we headed back there. The beach was completely different, when we were there at night time it was low tide and during the day on Sunday it was high tide, the difference is about 50 meters, it looks like a completely different beach. The water comes right up to the base of trees. I wasn’t smart enough to get a photo of the trees overhanging the water but you can see from the shade on my feet that the tree is hanging right over my head while Nemo goes for a very shallow wade in the water.

A few more pics from our ride to Christo Rei

All in all Naomi and I are having a great time. Right not we are sharing a Bintang Bot (500ml stubbie) waiting for a few friends to go out to dinner. I had never had a Bintang before, it’s much better than I thought it would be, certainly suits the climate, but you just can’t go past Aussie beers at the price that a few of the local bars are selling them for.

Thanks for reading!

Ben and Nemo

PS: Here is a massive gecko that was watching us buy our muesli!

 PPS: The internet was down for a while last night so I'm uploading it a day after I wrote it, if that makes sense

Week 1 - Dili

Bonoite!

Finally got around to starting up a blog. I'm not sure if I will get to write on it much or how many people will check it, but it just seems easier to write things that Naomi and I see and do on here rather than send thousands of emails week in week out and/or spam everyone's facebook.

This is our 4th night in Dili and up until today it was all a bit of a blur. We left Canberra on Tuesday evening, had a brief stop at Brisvegas and landed in Darwin at about 1am Wed morning. Had about 4 hours sleep at the airport motel and headed back to the airport to fly to Dili.

I think we set a new world record with luggage, our luggage managed to grow by over 10kg in Canberra and we checked on just over 91kg of luggage between the two of us and would have easily had another 30kg in carry on. It was something to behold! We did however have to pay $150 in excess in Darwin with Air North, which wasn't too bad, they gave us an extra 10kg allowance each. But the awesome people at Virgin managed to squeeze all our excess luggage on for free on all of our flights around the country.

Getting off the plane was interesting, having been in Canberra for the last 2 weeks with a maximum temp of 13 in that time and a few mornings at -5 degrees it was a rude shock to step off the plane into 28ish degrees and some pretty heavy humidity. Being that little bit closer to the equator the sun just seems to have so much more bite. The temperature in the mornings is really nice up until about 9am then the sun is just scorching until the late afternoon.

We were picked up at the airport by our In Country Manager (ICM) and taken for a nice ride from the airport, which is almost at the northern most end of Dili through the center of town down to one of the restaurants on the south side of the city. That ride through the city I got a fair taste of what Dili is all about, not having been overseas before alot of the things I saw I found really out of the ordinary. Men carrying fish hanging from bamboo sticks on their shoulders, dilapidated boats in the harbor, dogs, goats, chickens and other animals roaming the streets, at one point we had to stop the car while a mother pig (she was HUGE) and her piglets crossed the road, mind you that wasn't on the main strip that was in one of the suburbs.

The restaurant we ended up at for lunch was a Chinese restaurant right on the beach, in fact I took the photo that is the background for the blog at the moment from where I was sitting with my lunch! Not a bad spot, especially considering I had an amazing chicken fried rice for only $4! In fact the food has been really good all around and really cheap depending on where you go for food. We had some pretty tasty Indian today, there were 5 of us eating, myself, Nemo, Tom, Karen and George, which are 3 of the other volunteers from our Pre Departure Training in Melbourne. We probably had 7 main dishes, 3 big naan breads, a few rice dishes and a couple beers/chi tea/waters each and it was $31 bucks. Tonight we ate at an Indonesian buffet type place and that was even cheaper, Nemo and I had a meal and a drink each and it was only $7.5.

A couple of shots from where we had lunch just after we landed

That first night was just as surreal as the lunch on the beach. We were invited to come to a party held by the family that runs the place which we are staying for the first couple of weeks here in Dili. We werent sure what the party was for at first, and we thought that it might just be a few people having dinner. It turned out it was the families daughter's conformation and it was a massive event, even though it was a Wednesday night there would have been 40-50 people there! They were so generous,  they asked us to be involved, invited us into their celebration, brought out a new beers quicker that we could finish the one before it and put on a massive spread of food (we saw the pig during the day that was part of the feast, but when we saw it it still had hooves, eyes and a tail, that was interesting) and asked nothing in return. It was also two other girls birthdays that night as well, so that made the night even bigger. Nemo and I got a photo with the girls who were celebrating their birthdays and conformation. The mother of one of the birthday girls delivered a speech to thank everyone for coming and just go over why we were all there and why it was such an important night for the girls. She did that speech first in English, then Bahasa Indonesian then in Tetun! Pretty impressive!

The people in Timor Leste are.....smaller that I was expecting, the blokes are small and the girls even smaller, you'll see what I mean in the photo, the girl in the white (it was her confirmation) was the tallest Timorese there, including the adults!

The view from the front door of our room

The Thursday and Friday we had more courses and orientation type things to do and a few items to organise like power adapters, mobile phones and toilet paper. 1 things that I didn't realise before I came was how little people are able to speak English in Dili. I knew that when we get out to the districts English would be rare if heard at all, but at least we would have had a few weeks of language classes behind us and some practice on the locals in Dili. But the truth of it is that there are very few Timorese that speak English. We are lucky enough that the family that runs our hotel speak it quiet well, but the staff at the local super markets, restaurants and stores mostly don't speak a word.

At restaurants and super markets I've found its relatively easy to get by without knowing the language, mainly because the locals are so tolerant of Malay (which roughly translates to people not from here, but if you are white then to the locals they just call you Malay) but also because you can just point to or pick up what ever you want to buy and then just give them the money. But when Naomi and I went to buy mobile phones that was another experience in itself. They didn't speak a word of English, and us not a word of Tetun or Bahasa. We needed to try out some phones, ask them to change the language settings on the phone so we could read it, ask to buy adapters to charge them, we had to barter, it was a nightmare. That said we got it done, though it did reinforce the fact that I need to make an effort to learn the language and quickly. I felt so ignorant, even though it was my first night and there wasn't really any way I could have done it differently, if it was me in their place and I was back in Australia and a foreigner had walked into my store and tried to get me to serve them and they couldn't even speak my language I would have been pissed off, insulted and angry, but these girls did it with a smile.

We did have one funny moment in the store when buying the phones. The girl was busy working on the phone settings, occasionally looking at us and asking a question in Tetun, we of course had no idea what she was saying. Then eventually her boss came over and asked her something, to which she replied "something something no comprehende" Nemo and I got really excited because we know that in Spanish/Portuguese comprehende means understand (Tetun derives alot of its words from either Portuguese or Indonesian) and we started smiling and repeating at them "yes yes we no comprehende". All the girls in the store cracked up laughing, we hadn't said two words in the last 10 minutes, choosing to communicate in hand signals and points as it is more universal then all of a sudden we are both loud and smiling saying that we don't understand, I think they had already figured that out.....

Even though we had only put in 2 and a half days of work/orientation it was a massive relief to finish on Friday arvo. It was just mentally sapping taking in all this new information, living in a city that doesn't speak English and taking in the humidity that I needed a rest. So we went to the local expat bar for a few not so cheap beers, some expensive food (relative to the local food, still miles cheaper than Perth) and a game of footy! I think I had seen about 10 Malay (white people) all day wondering around the city, but that night in the bar there were 50 or 60, flies to a lamp. But the beer was cold, it was awesome to have  a dirty big oily pizza as a change from all the Asian food and the footy, even though the teams were terrible and because the crows are useless and gave away their massive lead I missed my multi, it was a damn good night!

Sunset from the balcony at One More Bar (the xpat bar)

Today we had the luxury of a nice slow morning, bit of a sleep in then we headed to the other end of town, near the Presidential Palace to a bike store to buy us some wheels. We figured Dili isn't all that big and push bikes were a pretty good way to get around and the exercise isn't going to hurt either. We had Indian for a late lunch and decided to head down towards the south end of the city for a bit of a ride and maybe a swim. On the way we went past a bunch of guys in little 4wds who had made a bit of an extreme 4WD track in the mud next to one of the beaches. Most were in tiny little rav4 type cars and were making these things hurt, absolutely flying around this track, I don't think they intended them to make it to the end of the afternoon. At the end of the track was a jump, most went over it fairly quick and got a little bit of air, but one of the guys hit it so fast he would have cleared about 5 meters and got at least 5 or 6 foot of air, madman! Naomi didn't get a pic of the jump but there is one of the track and a few of the bystanders, including a horse which was standing right next to us as we watched....

After watching the 4WDing for a while we starting riding again headed along the beach. By the time we got to the beach in front of the Kaz Bar, we took a seat on a few of the chairs in the sand out the pub. It was a pretty good spot, the waitresses come up to you and take your order and bring you the beer, while you sit there and watch the sun go down over the water.........

So that has been our first 4 or 5 days in Timor Leste. I know I rambled a bit, but if I left anything out mum would either kill me or ring me every night, I'm not sure which is worse...... kidding :-) Tomorrow we are thinking of doing another bike ride to the top of one of the local mountains, but not sure if it will happen or not yet. Probably just have a quiet day and get ready for next week, where we both get to go to the Dili officies of our new jobs and meet the staff and we have 4 hours of language training per day as well. So that should all be a bit of fun.

Thanks for reading (if you made it down this far) and sorry if was a little hard to read, I am completely knackered!

Ben and Naomi