The following morning our first stop was the Indonesian Embassy, where we applied for new Indonesian visas in order to re-enter the country at the end of the week. The good news was that the processing time was shorter than we had been told: two days rather than four. The bad news was that the visa fee was far higher than we had expected: $45 instead of $25 for a 30-day visa on arrival or $10 for a 7-day visa on arrival. Given that most people applying for visas in Dili are citizens of Timor-Leste, it seems that the government of Indonesia, a bit bitter after the battle for independence, is now saying, "You want to be rid of us? Fine, but good luck coming back to visit."
After dropping off our passports and visa applications, we wandered back into the center of town and had another look at the tent cities that we had seen the previous night. In the daylight, it became clear that it wasn't only the tent cities that were hosting people: various buildings along the main road had been overrun by squatters who had seemingly taken up residence some time ago. Sanitation around both the tent cities and the recommissioned buildings seemed mediocre at best: trash was everywhere, the stench of urine filled the air, and pools of dirty water served as mosquito breeding grounds. Much of the population of the tent cities seemed to be getting its fresh water from an exposed underground pipe that someone had put a hole in: water was gushing out and residents were speedily filling buckets; some were even taking showers.
We continued on to the eastern edge of town, and here we got a taxi to take us the remaining 7km to the end of the bay, where there was a nice beach, some decent coral, and a 27m Jesus statue presiding over the whole area. We climbed to the top of the hill on which the Jesus statue sat, and on the way up we passed small representations of the 14 Stations of the Cross. The whole complex had been built by the Indonesian government back when East Timor was still a province of that country, and Indonesia couldn't resist embedding a political message in the supposed gift: at 27m, the Jesus statue represents the 27 different provinces in Indonesia, of which East Timor was one.
On our way back down to the beach we passed several heavily armed UN police officers who were doing some sort of training in a parking lot at the base of the hill; it turned out that they were Portuguese, as much of the UN police (known locally as"unpol," pronounced the way it looks) in Timor-Leste is. Timor-Leste was, of course, once a Portuguese colony, and its former overlord still exerts a considerable amount of power in the young country. Plus, Portuguese is still the official language, although Tetun is far more widely spoken by locals.
Back on the beach, we did a bit of snorkeling, which, after an initial swim through nearly 100 meters of shallow, seaweed-infested water, turned out to be quite decent, especially considering the reef's proximity to Dili Harbor. We did a bit of reading, and then we started chatting with a blonde girl who was, at the time, the beach's only other inhabitant. It turned out that the girl was a sort of internal journalist for the UN, although she seemed to be greatly limited in what she could publish; indeed, it was almost as if her primary job was to write official statements for the UN if and when they required them. Needless to say, it didn't seem like the most rewarding job in the world.
Originally from Lithuania, the girl had been living in Dili for nearly two years, and she was headed home soon, which she seemed to be looking forward to. After we had been talking for about an hour, one of her UNPOL friends, a man from Portugal, arrived at the beach on his gigantic motorbike and joined in the discussion. Confused as to what we could possibly be doing in Timor-Leste, the two UN workers eventually concluded that we must be spies for the CIA, although we quickly pointed out that there wasn't much to spy on here. The conversation quickly shifted to the recovery effort that the UN had been leading ever since the war for independence, and the UNPOL officer didn't have many good things to say. He indicated that nothing much was getting done, and that much of that was a result of UN workers coming here for a short period of time and only caring about getting paid and leaving. We asked about the tent cities and were told that they housed people from all over Timor-Leste who felt unsafe living in the countryside, where the resistance movement against the current government is based. The tents had been in place for years, and they weren't expected to go anywhere anytime soon.
Finally, we asked about the recent attempted assassination of President Ramos-Horta, and we got a detailed account of the day from both of our new friends. It seems that that leader of the resistance movement, Alfredo Reinado, who supposedly planned the assassination, was killed early in the morning, before any shots were fired at the President. Apparently, Reinado, a former officer in the Timor-Leste military who deserted in 2006 to join 600 recently-fired soldiers in a sort of rebel militia, was enough of a problem that the Timor-Leste government had ordered its military to shoot him on sight. His usual base was high in the country's central mountains, and it's unclear why he was in Dili on the morning of the attempted assassination, given that he had planned the attack but wasn't one of the soldiers actually carrying it out. In any case, Reinado was shot dead first thing in the morning, and it wasn't until a couple hours later that news broke that the President had been shot. Dili was in lockdown mode for the rest of the day, and a government-imposed curfew is still in effect now, but for the most part life returned to normal the day after the shootings, according to our UN friends.
We had now been talking for a couple hours, and sunset was fast approaching, and we realized that we had no method of transportation back to town: taxis didn't come out this far looking for passengers, and neither did microlets, as the local minibuses are called. But the Lithuanian girl had a UN pickup truck, so we asked her if we might catch a ride back to town. Although civilians aren't allowed in UN vehicles, she was nice enough to take us anyway, and fifteen minutes later we were back at our hostel.
A quick word on costs in Timor-Leste: this country is not cheap. A combination of a high concentration of relatively wealthy aid workers and a lack of local production of, well, anything has led to prices that are many times higher than in neighboring Indonesia. Here, a gallon of gas costs over $4 ($2 in Indonesia), a can of Coke costs $1 (50 cents in Indonesia), an hour on the internet costs an average of $6 (less than $1 in Indonesia), and the cheapest bed in town costs $10/person ($3/person in Indonesia). The upside is that all the foreign workers has led to a wealth of restaurants and bars; although we didn't sample the bar scene because of the 11pm curfew, we did eat at a fantastic Indian restaurant every night we were in Dili.
The next morning we arose at 5am and, after a quick detour to the Jesus statue to retrieve Ian's book and sunglasses (which were both miraculously still lying on the beach), we caught a bus headed south into the mountains. Our plan was to get off the bus at a town called Maubisse, and from there hitchhike down a side road to the base of Mt. Ramelau, the highest mountain in Timor-Leste. After hiking the mountain we'd hitchhike back to Maubisse and then catch a bus back to Dili. The first part went according to plan: after an hour delay due to a fallen tree that was blocking the road, we continued up into the mountains and arrived in Maubisse before noon. We ate lunch at a small Indonesian-style (glass case) restaurant, and then we caught another bus to the turnoff to Mt. Ramelau. But it was at this point that we ran out of luck. After five hours of sitting on the side of the road waiting for a car, a motorbike, anything, to drive by (and being stared at intensely by locals who must have wondered what in hell we were doing), we gave up and hitched a ride back to Maubisse in the back of a truck. We checked into a guesthouse that sat atop a hill overlooking the town. Formerly an old Portuguese home, the guesthouse was beautiful, and only cost $18 for the two of us (although rates rose to $60 on the weekend to account for the aid workers who streamed in looking for an escape from the suffocating Dili heat).
After a quick jog through the hilly and quite picturesque little town, we showered and walked down the hill looking for food, but despite the fact that it was only 7pm, both of the restaurants in town were closed. Annoyed, we hiked back up the hill to our guesthouse, where dinner cost $8 instead of the $2 it cost in town. But when we asked to see a menu, we were told that there was no more food: we would have had to put in our order hours ago if we had wanted dinner that night. Perfect. We hiked back down the hill and purchased a dinner of chocolate wafers and hard candy from a small shop, the only place in town that was still open. Unsatisfied, we went to bed early and counted down the hours until breakfast.
The next morning, after eating, we caught a ride back to Dili, but this time we were not in a bus but in the back of a truck that had long wooden benches installed on either side of the bed. Unlike on the bus, we had plenty of legroom, and we figured that the ride down to Dili would be more comfortable than the bus ride up. We were wrong. Seated on the wooden benches, with our backs against round metal poles, we felt every bump in the road, and, needless to say, there were many, many bumps in the road. Also, the truck's exhaust pipe extended only halfway down the wooden truck bed, so clouds of black exhaust shot up through the spaces between the truck bed's wooden boards and directly into our faces. At one point someone put a plastic container over one of the spaces hoping to block the exhaust, but that did little but push the fumes to another gap in the wood. In short, the ride down to Dili was not particularly pleasant; when it was over, my back was bruised from the metal poles and my lungs felt like I had just emerged from a 22-hour ride on a smoke-filled Indonesian bus.
Back in Dili, we did little else than pick up our passports from the Indonesian Embassy and then stop by the American Embassy, where I hoped to get extra pages put in my passport. False hope. The American Embassy in Dili apparently has the authority to do, well, nothing. If I wanted extra passport pages, I'd have to wait three weeks for my passport to be sent to the American Embassy in Jakarta. No, thanks.
On Thursday morning, just as we were about to catch our minibus back to Kupang, we got word that President Ramos-Horta had just arrived at the Dili airport and was headed into town in a motorcade. Initially we were worried that our bus would leave before the President arrived, but it soon became clear that the bus, which was picking us up at our hostel, would have no chance of making it down the main road until after the motorcade had passed: the street was mostly closed off by UNPOL vehicles, and the sidewalks were thronged with locals waving flags and hoping to catch a glimpse of their President as he passed. A few minutes later, the motorcade appeared, and we caught a glimpse of Ramos-Horta as he (boldly) leaned out the window and waved. A few minutes later, our minibus arrived, and, our short, odd stay in Timor-Leste complete, we were Kupang-bound.
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