Days 189 - 190: Maumere to Kupang to Dili

Having spent the past week and a half jumping from tiny town to tiny town, Ian and I were hoping for something a little bigger in Kupang. We didn't get it. Kupang, the largest city in West Timor (i.e. the part of the island of Timor that still belongs to Indonesia), turned out to be a slightly more sprawling version of the Flores towns with which we had become so familiar. Internet was still painfully slow, entertainment was still nonexistent, and the most common form of restaurant still involved a glass case filled with unidentified objects that had been cooked anywhere from two hours to two weeks ago. But I'm getting ahead of myself: the first couple hours in Kupang involved a hasty and desperate search to secure transportation for the next few days, and during those hours we thought nothing of internet, entertainment, or food.

Although we had researched flights to and from Timor-Leste (as East Timor is officially known) online, it was still totally unclear which flights were still running and which were suspended indefinitely. Apparently Kakoak Airlines (Timor-Leste's first commercial airline) and Merpati had both flown from Dili to Kupang at one point, but we weren't able to ascertain whether these flights were still operating; as a result, we didn't know which day to book our flight from Kupang back to Surabaya (Java)-- we'd need a later flight if we took a bus rather than a plane back from Dili.

Our schedule was complicated by the fact that Indonesian visas were available on arrival only at Kupang airport-- not at the border crossing between Timor-Leste and West Timor. As a result, if we couldn't catch a flight from Dili to Kupang, we'd have to get new Indonesian visas in Dili before we could return to Indonesia, and those visas (somehow) took four days to process. Complicated, yes, but the gist of all this is that we would be forced to stay in Dili longer if we couldn't catch a flight out, and that would subsequently delay our flight out of Kupang. But we needed to book our tickets out of Kupang while we were physically in Kupang (because there's no such thing as online booking on Indonesian airlines), and given that we were planning to leave at 6am the following morning for Dili, that meant we had to book our tickets out of Kupang the night of our arrival. And that gave us two hours from the time our plane touched down on the runway; that is, assuming these airline offices actually closed at the prescribed times.

We pushed our way off the plane and into Kupang airport and immediately began asking about flights from Dili to Kupang. Despite the fact that I was speaking Indonesian, no one seemed to be able to answer my question. In the end, I realized that this was because there were no flights from Dili to Kupang, and there hadn't been for so long that "Dili" was simply not a word in the airline employees' vocabularies.

Satisfied that we had finally established our method of transport to and from Dili (bus), we jumped in a taxi and headed for the Transnusa Airlines ticket office, where we needed to book our flight from Kupang to Surabaya. As luck would have it, the office was still open, and we booked our flight for the following Saturday, assuming that we'd arrive in Dili the following night (Sunday), submit our Indonesian visa applications on Monday morning, and pick them up on Thursday evening in time for a bus back to Kupang on Friday. It was to be a whirlwind of a few days, and we wondered if our short visit to Timor-Leste would end up being worth all this hassle, but given that we were so close to the war-torn (and, more recently, attempted assassination-torn) country, we couldn't bear not to at least survey it for a few days.

The final piece of the puzzle was our bus to Dili the following morning; I called the company that ran the minibus, Timor Travel, and, in my best Indonesian, reserved two seats. We were to wait for the minibus outside our hotel at 5am the next morning; the only problem was that we didn't yet know in which hotel we were staying. I promised to call back as soon as we had checked in somewhere.

We found a hotel, and I asked the manager to call and confirm our reservation with the bus company, just to be sure that there was no misunderstanding: we desperately needed to get to Dili by Sunday evening, or our Indonesian visas wouldn't be ready for pickup in time for us to make our flight out of Kupang on Saturday morning. But when the manager called, the bus company told him that they were very sorry but they had made a mistake-- there was only one seat available for the next morning's bus. We froze as the manager conveyed the information to us: what were we to do now? I suggested that one of us sit in the aisle, but the manager didn't understand what I meant. Now we were getting desperate. The company told us we could have two seats on Monday morning's bus, but that did us no good-- we needed to arrive on Sunday evening. We pleaded with our hotel manager, and he pleaded with the company, but to no avail; apparently, we were in serious trouble. Then, just as the manager was about to hang up the phone, the man on the other end of the line miraculously said that he now had two seats for the following morning. I had no idea what had changed in those five minutes, and I didn't care-- I told the manager to say "terima kasih" and hang up the phone immediately. Whew.

The next morning we rose at 4:30am to find our breakfast, just served, waiting for us on the porch. For a $4/night hotel, this place had fine service. We scarfed down the food and walked out to the street to wait for our bus, but at 5:15 it was still nowhere to be found. At 5:30 we began to worry, and at 6:00 we were miserable. After the previous night's drama they had forgotten to pick us up?

At 6:15 I finally got through to the bus company via phone, and to my relief they said that the bus was still coming; I didn't even consider expressing my dissatisfaction that I had woken up at 4:30 only to wait around for an hour and a half. At 6:30, the bus pulled up, and, finally able to breathe normally again, we climbed aboard.

The minibus ride was a marathon; the first section, in West Timor, took us through lush mountains along curvy, steep roads, while the next section, approaching the Timor-Leste border, took us back to the palm-fringed coast, where we caught glimpses of turquoise water and deserted beaches. We reached the border around 1pm, and the crossing was relatively painless, if a touch slow; we were on the road again just after 2:30.

Most of the passengers in the Timor Travel minibuses (there were four of them in our caravan) were Indonesian, but two were Australian, and we spoke to them briefly at one of the rest stops, and again at the border crossing. One was a 60-year old documentary film maker, and the other was an (attractive) woman of 29 who was working as his assistant. We didn't delve into the relationship further, although we were quite curious. In any case, the man was in the midst of making a documentary about Timor-Leste, and while he spoke on that subject he seemed reasonably intelligent. But then he began to discuss economics, including his view that the US dollar would drop until it was worth only one cent, and his belief that the worldwide banking system was a fraud because it relied upon banks lending money that they didn't actually have in their vaults. Confused, I questioned him on the latter point, and it turned out that he didn't exactly understand the concept of "fiat money"-- money with no intrinsic value. Somehow, he believed that the world had been fooled into using money that was worthless, while the only true money remained that which was backed by gold. Whatever, dude.

We arrived in Dili after dark, at around 8pm. After checking into a backpackers hostel, we wandered around town a bit, and the first things we noticed were the immense tent cities that occupied much of downtown. The hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tents were clearly somewhat permanent: they were all filled with the belongings of their occupants, and most had electricity; some even had satellite TV. We made a mental note to inquire about the tents in the morning, but for the time being we were too tired to do anything but collapse in our beds. Further Dili exploration would have to wait until morning.