Hey!
So as I said in my last blog we finally got to move into our
new house! We have been here just over 2 weeks now and it is fantastic. Last
weekend I took a few pics of the house and thought I would just post them here
on the blog and show you guys where we are living! Going to be a record number of photos in this blog, so less of me writing! yay for everyone :-)
It’s been called by more than one person the best house in
rural Timor and you would be hard pressed to disagree. It does look like a
Canadian wood log cabin and for good reason, the lady that owns it is Canadian.
She married into a Timorese family and their family owns the land where the
house is. When I say their family owns it I mean that our landlords own our
house, next door is her brother in laws house, at the bottom of the hill are a
few houses which have other sisters and brothers in them and around the corner
but still on the hill are a few more houses which have all sorts of cousins and
other family members in them.
Here is the house! It was only built about 2 years ago and
up until a few months ago they rented it out sporadically as a guest house for
people coming to Same for the weekend or for a short stay, a week or so. But as of the tenants before us, two UNVs who
were there for a few months it’s now a
permanent residence for people like us, who will be staying for a year or two
at a time. We were just lucky enough to get here at around about the right
time, as compared to this place there isn’t anything anywhere near as good in
Same.
Pics from the front of the house
Toilet/Outhouse on the left hand side
There are actually 2 toilets, besides having small pipes in the loos they do their job
Both of them look the same inside, you will notice no shower though, its bucket showers for us!
Here are a few pics of the verandah/porch/balcony area
The hammock
Our breakfast/dinner table
The view from our breakfast table, with your head turned slightly to the left
View directly in front of the table, notice my friend the rooster stalking my yard, more on him later...
Head turned to the right
Nemo studying hard
So glad I never became a nurse....
The view off the back of the verandah, when I move that thing behind the bikes
View from the kitchen window
Me in the hammock
Kitchen window view again, just at different times of the day
Now to the inside of the house. Its a kit house type thing, so it has an open ceiling, though there are mesh type things in the ceiling in the awnings so that no bugs can get in. It has 4 rooms, one is our bedroom, one we have made into a living room/tv room, we have a storage room and a spare bedroom. The kitchen is in a big open L shaped area which has the front door and back door at either end of the L
Kitchen, gas stove, sink, fridge, back door is just out of shot on the left
Open ceiling
Kitchen bench
Front door
Living room, where we watch tv on the laptop and Nemo beats me at chess
More open ceiling
Storage room
Spare room, where any of you can come and stay, we have a spare bed and a few more spare mattress'!!!!
We have a lot of wildlife in and around our place. Here are
just a few pics of the menagerie that usually is our front yard/house. I posted
a pic in an earlier blog of this reindeer, who lives next door with his 2
girlfriends, though sometimes they are tied up right out the front of our place
on the soccer goals.
There are a herd of cows, maybe 7 of them that sometimes
wander up to the top of the hill for a little munch, they came up the other
night as Nemo and I were having a tinnie on the porch.
There are a few dogs in the neighbourhood, who they all
belong to I have no idea. Nemo has been keen on getting a pet for ages, she
doesn’t care if it’s a dog, cat, goat, monkey or chicken, in fact she has
wanted each one more than once and made a pitch, but I put the foot down and
she hasn’t gotten any of them. Until this little fella came along one afternoon
and she decided to feed him all our leftover chicken in the fridge. He still
isn’t our dog, but he certainly spends a lot of time out the front of our house
these days.
At one point we did have a pet rat, intended or not. Just
after we moved into the house we noticed a bit of mouse poo and some things had
been eaten or chewed on and we figured out we had mice. The first night it was
a box of sultanas, the next night they chewed through a mesh bag and a
cardboard box just to chew on and leave teeth marks in Nemo’s spare asthma
puffer ….. WTF right. Anyway after that we had all the food in airtight boxes
and I used electrical tape to block the gap under the door where he was getting
in. That didn’t stop him, apparently he didn’t mind chewing right through that.
We had a couple of noisy nights where he was scurrying around looking for
things to eat, which was especially disconcerning as our mattress is on the
floor atm while we are looking for a half decent bed frame….. Anyway, long
story short, one night we went out for dinner and mr mouse, or should I say Mr
Huge Rat, thought the house was dark and he would take a look around. So we
came in and turned the lights on, giving him, and Nemo the frights of their
lives, she screamed, he ran for the hole under the door he has just re-chewed
through. He was a good size, way too big for my liking, so I started baiting
bread and chicken meat that night, he was a resilient bastard, he always ate it
all, but it took about 3 nights of baiting for him to finally die, unless there
were more than one of them, anyway we haven't had another one since, so that’s a
win for us I reckon.
And then there was the rooster. The most magical, majestic
and regal rooster I have seen in Timor. He is a stunning specimen of a cock,
royal green tail feathers, a large puffed up breast area, much bigger than your
standard Timor rooster, this proud rooster has lead an indulgent and comfortable
life. If he didn’t live right next door to me I am sure that I would love this
rooster, but he does, so I don’t. In fact to say I don’t love him doesn’t do it
justice, I HATE this rooster. He is a cheeky, sneaky, arrogant bastard of a
bird that loves nothing more than to piss me off. He skulks around the outside
of the house and crows at the windows, goes under the house and crows directly
underneath my bed while we are sleeping. When I go outside to yell/stare/throw
things at him he flees at full speed back to his side of the yard. His house is
about 20 metres from ours, the noise from there is acceptable, the noise from
him and his posse of hens under the house while I’m sleeping is not….. He is a
crafty bird though, even whilst I am outside on the balcony reading, I’ll be
watching him on his side of the yard, but…. If I take my eyes off him even for
one minute the next thing I know he is nowhere to be found and before long,
there will be an almighty crow from right behind me, no more than a metre away
from the porch and then he will scuttle back to his side of the yard, it’s a
crow-and-run or a drive-by-crowing. I hate that cock!
Well and truly too close to my house...
There is good news though, we have a house manager, who
lives down the road, we call on him if we need things fixed or anything like
that. In a conversation we had with him last week Naomi mentioned that the
Rooster was very loud and that would it be appropriate if we asked the
neighbours to tie it up on the far side of the house. To which he simply
replied ‘maybe you don’t need it tied up, maybe it dies, maybe tomorrow it will
be dead, it can’t make any noise if it’s dead’……We are pretty sure our house
manager is organising a hit on the cock, which got us pretty excited, though
it’s been a letdown so far, the cock is still crowing….
Nemo went for a walk the other day and it turns out one of our neighbours has a monkey. Apparently they are native to the Timor jungles, not that we have seen one, we only see them when they are tied up like this....
So what animals have I covered so far, cows, reindeer, dogs,
rats, monkeys, chickens, there is a really cute mother goat with 2 little babys around
the corner, I will have to try and get a photo of that soon, our next door neighbour has a pretty big pig, I was almost stung
by a scorpion that lives on our water tank but the last one I will bore you
with is geckos.
I never knew until I came to Timor that geckos make noise, it’s
a clicky/squaky noise, I was adamant that it wasn’t the geckos making that
noise that I heard everywhere at night time, but it seemed as if I was the last
person in the world to find out that they make noise. Either that or in
Australia the geckos are so small by comparison that you can’t hear the noise,
so that’s why I didn’t know. Here in Timor geckos are everywhere, in the
supermarket, the toilet, the kitchen, on every wall, in every house,
everywhere. But your average gecko isn’t a few centremetres long like it is in
Australia. Id say over here the average gecko is about twice the size of an
Aussie gecko, but you do get some even bigger ones. The first pic is a small gecko on the window, but the second pic is a gecko
trying to hide behind a hand cream lotion bottle, anyway the bottle is
about 12-15cm tall, so that’s one big gecko!
Then came this …..thing. I am still not sure what it is, it
could be a weirdly coloured lizard of some kind that I am not sure what it is,
or it could be the worlds biggest gecko, one which would earn me some
recognition in the Guiness World Record Books, or what I really think it might
be is a new species of super gecko, undiscovered until now, in which case I
would get to name it. Names getting thrown around are the Benjamin’s Gecko,
Geckorat, Geckogrumper, Super-Gecko and Gecko-Dragon. We walked out of the
living room and turned the lights on in the kitchen and I saw something large
move up in the rafters, seeing as we had been having a rat problem I just
instantly thought that it was the rat. But then I realised it was a lizard, its
about the size of a decent sized beared dragon from back home, about 20cm long.
At first I had no idea what it was, but then taking the photos of it I noticed
its feet, very gecko like, and its colour, which you cant really see from the
photo, but it was a pale greeny colour with bright coloured spots, which is the
same as the smaller geckos around our house. Then I realised that I might have
stumbled upon the mother of all geckos!
I’m not sure if I had mentioned it at any point yet but we
got ourselves some wheels! Here is our hog
It’s a Honda Win 100, 4 speed manual, does 30kph in second
gear, I’m not gonna lie, its pretty sick. Anyway its made getting to and from
work a bit easier as our place is 3k up a hill from where our offices are, the
push bike ride to work was a breeze, you don’t pedal, but the 10minute ride up
a hill in first gear on the way home was a little annoying everyday. Anyway we
took the hog for a spin on the weekend, past the local airport, through a
village and to a river. Here are a few pics of the adventure.
Filling up the hog before we headed out
Same Airport
The suspension bridge
A fantastically timed photo taken by Nemo, no visible nudity!!
The suspension bridge
Nemo sitting in the river thinking about life…..or peeing,
one of the two
A man and his horse crossing the river
Whats scarier that a Mohawk, a dude with a machete and a
Mohawk!
Still not sure what she is doing....
Nemo and Mr Machete having a chat
On the way back we decided to use the landing strip at the airport to give Nemo a motorbike lesson, here are a few pics of her having a ball, she was a natural!
Here is our local butcher
The petrol station
The clothes store
Truck delivering fruit to the market, the two open buildings behind the truck are the markets
Markets on the right, local rubbish disposal on the left.......thats it in a good state....
Every evening the front yard of our house is converted from the big open area into a fierce battle ground, all the boys from all the families on the hill come and play soccer, every night. They range in age from about 8 to 18 and sometimes the older uncles come out as well. These are a few pics of me having a game with them. They were so excited for me to come and play that it didn't matter how bad I was or how out of position I was they all just passing it to me. These kids grow up on soccer, they live and breathe it, so even the 12 year olds were killing me 1 on 1, they were taking the ball off me like it was candy and I was a newborn. That said, when I started playing the team I was on was down 0-2, when the chips had landed, the dust had settled and the game was done, the score was 4-2, and yours truly had kicked all 4 of the goals. I was a local hero and I may or may not have put my shirt over my head and run around like I was an aeroplane after I kicked a penalty goal that got us in front....
Ben and Nemo
