Atauro!!

Botardi!

Again it’s been so long since I wrote anything on here that it’s going to take me ages to write it all down! I will try and keep it short, but a lot has happened, thus why it has taken so long to find the time to write any other post.

Both of us have well and truly started work, both of us putting in gruelling half days around our language training, which finished up today. On Monday we were both due to work in the morning and then have class in the afternoon, it was supposed to be our first day of real work (rock up and actually do something instead of orientations). My boss was away for the day, in Melbourne for a conference, so she told me to have the day off and study my Tetun some more. Naomi however had to go in. We had been out on Atauro Island for the weekend and weren’t due to get in until 8am on Monday morning. Due to the weather being atrocious (high winds and swell) we didn’t get back until about 10am, but I was just happy we were still alive. So where we are staying is the guest house on the second floor of Naomi’s work. To get to our room we have to walk directly through the middle of her office then go up the stairs. So Naomi was supposed to be at the office at 8:30am for her first day of work, instead she rocked up at 10am, soaking wet, flippers in hand, sopped her way through the office, up the stairs, had a shower, got dressed and came back down for her first day of work at about 10:30am, before leaving at 12noon for class. Superb first impression!!!!

Her work was fine with it, they understood. Apparently the boat that we caught back is fairly unreliable and her boss and the people in Timor in general are very flexible and understanding, they just had a laugh at her and got on with whatever they were doing. Aside from work and class we have been keeping busy, bike riding, eating and drinking WAY too much and we found a cinema and watched a few flicks there. They only really show movies that have something to do with Timor (Balibo, Answered By Fire), but it’s got good air conditioning and they are worth a watch. Eating here has its ups and downs. As long as you know where to eat and more importantly where not to eat its fine, in fact (touch wood) I’m the only one who hasn’t had an upset stomach yet…….There are cooked fish markets on the foreshore, lots of Warungs (Indonesian eateries, which are REALLY cheap), a few western type places that are really expensive, a Turkish place, a Japanese place and a really good Indian Restaurant. The names of the restaurants are really creative, some of my favourites are; Indian Restaurant, Turkish Restaurant, Dili Beach Hotel, Dili Hotel, Timor Hotel, City Café, Beach Café, Dili Beach Café, Dili Beach Hotel and One More Bar.

 At one of the warungs Naomi, Paul and myself had dinner there before going to see a movie. We each ordered the same thing (fried rice), with slight variations……..Nemo had fried rice with no beef, I had friend rice with no egg and Paul had fried rice with both beef and egg. This is how they came out……..

So even at restaurants which you think are safe to eat at, sometimes you still don’t know what’s going to come out. Again, we had lunch at the homestay on Atauro Island, fish was part of the lunch…….

Pass……..

Nemo's new favourite drink

Sweat in a can? Pass……

So we moved out of our hotel room a week ago into the guest room directly above the office that Nemo works in. It was very very nice of Nemo’s organisation to allow us to use it until we head to Same. The room is much bigger than the hotel room, which was a nice change and it is on the other side of town (still on the beach, infact closer to the beach) so we now have a whole new bunch of restaurants to try out! The shower is a little interesting, it’s just a metal type hose that comes out of the wall, the water is luke warm and if you hold it in the wrong spot you give yourself a small electric shock! I suppose it’s good though, as we when we get to Same we will be using a bucket shower, so this is a nice in-between to get ourselves ready for the bucket!

There is a kitchen upstairs, but not really any cooking utensils, so we still have to eat out every night, poor us right? After 3 weeks of eating out every night, it actually gets really tedious, both of us are dying for a home cooked meal, where are you when we need you Julie!!!!! Though the facilities are good enough for us to make ourselves brecky, we get up, make some muesli with fresh fruit and sit on the balcony and look at the ocean, or the two dogs having sex, which is what was happening right out front yesterday morning during breakfast. Nemo had never seen dogs have sex before, with the mounting, then the back to back lock together, it was a fairly enlightening and humorous five minutes for her.

Our breakfast balcony, the beach is just over that road, about 50m from the balcony, the trees are blocking it from sight in this pic.

So I said earlier about this Island that we went to visit over the weekend, Atauro. We went with a few of the other vollys that are in Timor; Karen, Danni and Christianna. It was a great chance to catch up with the girls as we did our Pre Departure Training with them and we hadn’t seen them in a while, they are a good bunch of kids, if not a little crazy. It was an epic weekend, which started with a 5:30 wake up to get to the ferry by 6.30am so we could leave by 7. Needless to say the ferry actually left at about 8am…..gotta love (and anticipate) Timor Time……

The ferry was massive as you can see, they loaded a few cars, bikes, crates and even a bunch of goats, chickens and at least one cow into the hold and off we went. It was slow…….and I mean slow, I don’t know how far exactly the island is away, about the same as Rottnest I would guess, our ferry’s take about 30 mins, this thing took over 2 hours. Anyway we finally got there and the place was a tropical paradise! We got all of our luggage, loaded it into the motorbike carrier tuuk tuuk type things and headed for where we were staying

When we got to Jerry’s Place (where we were staying, apparently Barry’s Place was full, again creative names!) I was blown away. It was about 100m off the beach, at the foot of the mountains and we were staying in these little straw hut things. As you can see from the photos it was just amazing!

We had ourselves some lunch, then headed down to the beach for some snorkelling and generally just to be lazy. The snorkelling was unreal, heaps of little blue fish, star fish and thousands of other sorts of fish and crabs. After that we parked ourselves under the shade of a tree on the beach, had a few drinks, a few ‘sneks’ (snack in Tetun) and watched the tide go out for a few hours.

This beach had a huge tide, I think I had mentioned before about the massive tides in Timor, the beaches look completely different at different times of the day. We came back the same spot in the morning when the tide was in, check out the difference!

 

While we were there Nemo made a friend. There was a little kid, who didn’t speak English, nor Tetun and was really interested in us. He sat in the bushes just behind us, in plain sight, for over an hour, just watching us. We tried to talk to him a few times, but he just sat there and stared blankly back at us. Then one of the girls noticed him climbing a tree, he got all the way to the top and started raiding a birds nest. Nemo tried to help the boy back down the tree by offering to hold the nest while he climbed down but instead he passed her one of the little birds from the nest… In the end we think he was trying to tell us that he was going to raise the birds, but I reckon he ate them…..

Over the next few days we got up to a heap of things; a few naps, lots of reading, dinner at an Italian restaurant that would put most in Freo to shame a long walk on the beach for an hour or two in which we saw a crocodile, or what we thought might have been a crocodile, then it might have been a crocodile, then even when we thought it wasn’t a crocodile, we walked up to it slowly. Turns out it was the most crocodile looking log of driftwood I have ever seen! 

 A horse tied to a tree

 The center of town

 The girls on the way to the Italian Restaurant

I also had my first bucket shower, my first squatting toilet experience, which was a little more interesting than it should have been due to some incorrect instructions from Nemo on how to use it. Which, without being too graphic, ended with me ‘reverse kanga-ing’ the squat toilet. There was also a big cultural festival on that weekend on the island, which was a nice coincidence as the girls got to filter through the markets and we got to see a whole bunch of traditional dancing and singing. There was one particular cultural song/dance that will stay with me for the rest of my life. It was haunting, words cannot explain, but I will try (luckily Nemo has a video of it, so we might try and upload it one day). It was a constant beat, fast but not crazy, then just two gongs over the top of it, one high and one low, about 4 seconds apart, that was the whole song and they literally played it for hours and hours without stopping once. At one point we rocked up, they were playing it, so we listened to it for about 20 minutes. We go bored of it after a while so we went to the markets, beach and walked around town for over an hour, came back, same song, same people playing the instruments, same, if not more people dancing. The dancing didn’t have two much structure, just a basic two or three step shuffle, with everyone going it their own direction. There were machetes and sticks being waved around and random high pitch squeals that broke up the steady trance type hypnotism that you fell into after 5 minutes of listening to it. It sounded like the music being played in a generic Hollywood blockbuster when someone has been caught by a jungle tribe, they are hog tied to a stick and hung over a fire while the cauldron is boiling ready for the tribe to eat them. Serious hypnotism type stuff, I said I wouldn’t have been surprised if we all woke up that night in a random place holding a machete doing the weird two step! Haunting….

On Monday morning we were up again before sunrise to head home on the ‘water taxi’. The ferry only runs on Saturdays, so that’s good for a half day trip or if you want to go for a week, for everything else there is the water taxi. The ferry is $5 and takes just over 2 hours and the water taxi is $30 and takes 90 mins, or so they claim. Being that the water taxi is 6 times the price of the ferry I was actually expecting (stupidly) something similar to the Rottnest ferries, only to rock up and see this

Though that picture wasn’t taken at the time, when we got on the boat there was a massive swell and a howling wind. It is an 8 seat dingy basically, defiantly didn’t look like it could handle the 20+km in-between the islands in this weather. Anyway after a short delay because the wind was too strong to leave, we boarded the boat for departure, even though the wind didn’t die down, the owner was just board of waiting. She also decided that this morning she would charge everyone $5 more and call it a fuel price hike, even though we had confirmed the price and departure time twice with her during the week. Anyway, the seas were rough, girls were throwing up everywhere (you know who you are), waves were constantly crashing over the boat, us and all our luggage was drenched and even the driver looked worried at times. In fact I expected him to turn around at one point, he stayed as close to the beach as he could for about an hour, going around to a point on the island where he could make the shortest bee-line back to Dili, he then let the boat idle for a minute or so and just stared out at the swell, cringing, filling me with confidence…… Then he went. I just put myself to sleep to avoid worrying about it, if I woke up in the water then so be it, I wasn’t going to sit there for 90 more minutes watching every wave hoping we didn’t capsize. In the end he must have been a really good captain and knew what he was doing as we made it back to Dili, two or so hours late, completely drenched, but everyone was safe and on dry land!

This week in Dili has been really interesting, the elections are tomorrow and this week all of the major political parties were allocated one day each in which they could do a massive campaign through the streets. First CNRT, then Fretlin, then the other smaller ones later in the week. They were all quite impressive, in size, fanaticism and noise levels, but it was on the Monday when CNRT had theirs that I was truly impressed. They were probably the biggest, but not by too much, the procession that roamed the streets for the day had in excess of 50 trucks loaded with people, speakers, flags and the like, hundreds upon hundreds of motorbikes either side of the trucks, another 50 or 60 cars and heaps of people running alongside. All of them making as much noise as they possibly could. When it went past our language class it would have easily taken 5 minutes for them all to get by us and they would have been going at 30-40kph, it was huge. It’s a shame I didn’t get a photo because words cannot do justice to the size or the noise that these guys made!!! That went on all week, as I said, each party had their own day to do exactly the same thing.

We had been advised to stock up on some supplies on the off chance things get a little crazy tomorrow, things like water, canned foods and all those survival type things. I think it will be fine over the weekend, if anything sizable is to happen it’s probably going to be early next week when the results start coming through, but I am sure it will be fine. Anyway we decided we should make a survival kit just in case

·        4 bottles of water

·        2 bottles of red wine

·        1 block of Cadbury (very expensive here) Chocolate

·        2 cans of baked beans

·        1 deck of cards

·        3 pirated moves from the Timorese equivalent of ‘jb hi fi’

·        1 bag of muesli

·        5 packets of Mi Goreng Noodles

·        A satellite phone

·        The delivery menu for the amazing Indian Restaurant down the road

I think we should be alright; either way Nemo and I are going to have a decent night tonight J

Miss you all, speak soon!!!

Ben and Nemo

PS: Skype works pretty well here just send us a message if you want our usernames!

PPS: Sorry that some of the pics are really low quality, they were actually all amazing quality, like 6m each, but i shrunk them to make them quicker to upload, apparently i shrunk them a little too much. 

Here is a random family of pigs and the view from the front of language classes to make it up to you!