kala tatap matamu sapa jiwaku
membiru lautmu memeluk pasir
kala harum nafasmu sebut namaku
januari di kota dili
kian hangat dalam ingatan
nantikanlah aku kembali
tuk menjemput cintamu
menguning bulanmu mengetuk malam
dan mesra jemarimu belai sukmaku
membias bintangmu menghias nyiur
dan hangatnya bibirmu kecup kalbuku
januari di kota dili
tak terkira cinta bersemi
januari lekas berganti
dan terhempas cintaku
januari di kota dili
kian hangat dalam ingatan
nantikanlah aku kembali
tuk menjemput cintamu
biarlah layar terkembang
ku ingin menyeberang
melintas pulau dan lautan
menjemput cintaku
belahan jiwa yang tertinggal
di timor loro sae
Timor Leste (19-26 February 2011)
The sea, The sky, The sun and The sunshines…
I love this song since long long time ago, too bad when I googled it I really couldn’t find the year of the release.
I was not really aware about the meaning of the lyrics, but I like the rhythm and music that goes really well with the beauty of the sea. I still came across this song only last year when I hunted for old songs. For now on, it would have different sentimental value for me.
Anyway, the song was made and sung when Timor Leste was still part of Indonesia. In 27 September 2002 it has become an independent country, one of the only two predominantly Roman Catholic countries in Asia beside Philippines.
It has been a while since I read and heard about the beauty of the place, however, for most of the rest, Timor Leste is more known as a place with political unrest, struggling independence, occupation and massacre. Most of the people who knew about my destination would either had no knowledge about the country, or commenting about how dangerous the trip would be, one person even commented,” What are you doing there? Isn’t it the place where people chop other people’s head?” I sort of expecting the reaction, although it’s more ignorant than I thought, so I replied” Well, to be fair, people chopped other people’s head everywhere. Even in Singapore, like what they found in Kallang River, and Orchard.”
So I am grateful that I found a crazy friend who shares common interest about going to uncommon destination and doing uncommon things. I would never expect to go there this soon if I never met this friend. I would but I don’t know when, companion is really important. Nobody wants to stuck in foreign country with people you don’t enjoy being with. So anyway, when there was a mention about going to Timor Leste, we jumped on it like kids being offered balloons and candies. Not a common reaction when you try to talk about it with someone else. But hey, great minds think alike. Ho ho ho.. the trip is supposed to be done in May, but due to some circumstances, we had to bring it forward.
It’s three party trips; my friend was bringing his best friend who is also his regular travel companion. There had been some planning hiccup along the short time, we only got it confirmed barely one and a half weeks before the departure date, and the confirmation was also only for our trekking trip, accommodation for two nights and flights. The rest, we would need to find ourselves only when we were there.
Everyone was busy with work and personal lives. I was also away for two days to attend a course from work, so there was only one night when three of us could meet together to buy the stuff that we were going to need. Since we had to bring our own food in the mountain and on the remote island we were going to stay, we needed some serious shopping, including digging out my 14 years old camping cooking tins. We still need to hunt for metal stove and solid fuels and it was not easy to find outside army shops that close in the evening, luckily I was able to get it directly from one of ex army guys through e-bay.
So on Monday, four days before departure day, we went to the big Carrefour in the ‘city’ and brought back groceries consisted of instant noodles, can foods, biscuit, coffees, teas, wet tissues, mosquito repellent, mosquito coils, torch batteries, chips, ponchos etc.
There are two options of flights to Dili, the capital of East Timor/Timor Leste. We could either fly from Denpasar Bali, or fly direct from Singapore. It’s a surprise for us that Singapore has direct flight, Air Timor, operated under SilkAir Singapore. The cost of direct flight was much higher than if we had to make a transit through Denpasar, however, we managed to secure great deal that include the trekking and two night hotels. We did consider making a stop to Bali for one two days, other than that, original plan was to go East Timor for at least one and a half or two weeks, but the other friend couldn't take long off from work.
Another option to reach Dili is by land from Indonesian border, but it would take long time that consists of tedious journey and more complicated arrangements.
Being Indonesian, I did have my worries in entering this country. The history between two countries was bloody and bitter, with some foot and blood prints still very fresh everywhere and in people’s memory. From a good friend of mine, I got in touch with an Indonesian who went there before and according to him it was alright. In fact, my Indonesian language was proved to be very useful to communicate there. Timorese speaks Tetum, Indonesian, English and Portugese. English and Portugese are very limited, some villagers only speak Tetum but some understand Indonesian.
Satuday, 19 February 2011
Three of us met early 7am in the morning at Terminal Two. We had our Burger King breakfast as usual trip starter. I had been going to quite a number of trips with this colleague and had met his friend on some occasions and short trip. Eventhough this would be the longest trip we were going to share together, we knew we were going to be able to put up with one another. Now I can say that I like travelling with these two as they are both fun, responsible, resourceful, and we all took care of each other very well, sharing all the craziness, worries and shits along the trips. Shit, I mean literally shits. Cow, pig, horse, dog’s shit. More on that later. Ha...
We did our check in and three of us would be seated at one row. Since we were quite early, we got middle seat in number 17. We thought it’s going to be empty flight, but it was fuuulllll, and when we were on board the plane, we realized that we were almost the only ones who looked very different with the rest.
There were some angmohs/bules in the flights, the rest are Timorese looking people, and a big bunch of Cubans who occupy almost half the flight. We are still not sure why there are a lot of Cubans going there.
So, it’s really obvious that three of us stood out from our looks and passport colors.
It was a four hours flight (surprisingly short), with Dili time one hour behind.
The airport of Dili, Presidente Nicolau Lobato International airport was located next to the seaside but we couldn’t see any whales as planned even though I pressed my face against the window. I was sitting on the land side, maybe that’s why. He… the airport is paralel to the sea and it was a very simple setting airport. We alighted from the plane straight to the pavement. We could already those signs of UN, planes, cars. Just a short distance from our plane, there was a big group of army soldier standing under the sun, all wore green uniform and they were locals. They stood in formation facing our flight.
(pictures by my colleague)We didn’t know the purposes of the formation, but the many sights of military presence gave me this feeling that ‘here I am – dili’.. I don’t know what I had that feeling, maybe because I also had some image built in my mind before I came here.
We were all stranded outside the airport building because basically there was not enough room for all, so we queue up along the corridors leading to the visa locket. Everyone needs to pay visa cost USD$30 dollar to enter the country. It was a long queue, but bit by bit the people around and behind us were being escorted somewhere else. They were either UN personals holding special pass, I guess, or locals. Anyway, we were obviously different, even the escorting officers didn’t bother to see our passport.
After sometimes, there were new batch of people coming, not sure where were they coming form, but magically the queue dispersed again. We also found out that we could proceed to the locket because a bunch of angmohs in front of us just stood there waiting for something instead of paying visa.
After got the receipt for the visa, we queued for immigration. Three of us were asked multiple questions like how long we intended to stay etc, we were all granted only 15 days but that was more than enough for us. After the immigration, we were almost already outside the building where rows of people on left and right making up a corridor. We walked all the way outside to find our pick-up. He was a local, representative from the hotel who never spoke a word along the way.
Anyway, my friend who sat in front didn’t try to strike conversation, so we only kept quiet and just looking around in the car.
East Timor was pretty much like Indonesia. The road, the signages, almost everything has Indonesian words, we also could find Portugese building and language. I could see kiosk, shops in Indonesian selling Indonesia product, Indonesian advertisement, basically it’s just look like home.
It was about half an hour to the hotel, we went through some winding coastal roads just next to the beach. For this first night, we would have the luxury of staying in proper hotel called Hotel California, it’s one of the better hotels offered as a package with the air tickets and trekking. The hotel looked nice, with its stone exterior.
Our room is the only one with towel on the top, to prevent more mosquitoes!
Gorgeous natural pergola at the entranceWe did our check-in, they were expecting us and we were escorted to a nice room just nearby the gate on first storey. They had already prepared everything and to our pleasant surprise, there was one young China guy who was probably the assistant manager, he became very important to us as it was quite difficult to communicate with the rest.
The room was originally very spacious; it was still very alright after converted into triple sharing, it could fit three queen size beds in one row with some space in between. There were cupboard and dressing table, which became the guy stuff’s area, and there was another writing table in the other corner for me. There were TV with cabinet, fridge in front of the beds, then the access to the bathroom.
The bathroom was also not bad with toilet, basin and shower area. We were happy to see that the beds were all very clean, with sparking white and high quality bedsheets, and each of us got three types of very clean white towel. This hotel would become very important base for us for the whole trip.
It was around 2-3 pm by the time we reached the hotel. Eventhough we had some meals onboard, we still needed our lunch. So we cleaned up and went to the hotel restaurant, for the first feel of the local food. East Timor only use USD and some local coins.
The cost of the meal in the restaurant was okay, around $4 for a plate of nasi goreng (fried rice) or mie goreng (fried noodle), and $2 for quite proper caffee latte and $1.5 for coca cola. I ordered nasi goreng, the rest tried mie goreng and noodle soup. The portion in Timor Leste was big, maybe because they get used to Western customers. The food was quite oily, and we didn’t find any meats in our meal but it was alright.
After meal, we walked out to the beach just ten over meters away in front of our hotel. We strolled around, anyway, we didn’t really have plan for the rest of the day. The beach looked like volcanic beach with dark grey sand. It also had some mangrove area, quite nice but not fantastic as there were some rubbish here and there and seaweed being washed up the shore.
We started to see some people jogging around, some angmohs and some local and African looking people.
We passed by some seaside natural restaurant set-up, some local eatery, small kiosk. Other than that it was basically grass patches with shrub and trees along the beach. There were nice looking trees with quite bushy top and yellow spiky flower, I hardly see that tree before, it also has nice looking very dark colored branches that spread around.
fishing nets
lonely boat
lonely treeWe strolled quite far away until we reached the winding coastal road. So the sea, shore, rocks, road and cliffs, that was the sequence of the coastal scenery. We saw many goats climbing on the cliffs, the roads were often wet in the afternoon because of the seawater breaking into the shore and rocks, reaching up high enough to splash the road one two meter higher.
There were some fishermen’s boats being parked on the shore or on the water near the shore. Some boats appeared as if they were half sinking because of the high tide.
look at this exhibitionist dog enjoying the afternoon...ha...(pictures by my colleague)
goat on the cliff (pictures by my colleague)
sinking boat or super high tide?
The weather was quite pleasant with a lot of wind. We were pondering whether we should grab a cab to go to Dili town which was nearby only, but remembered what we read that it’s not advisable to go the town at night. Since it was our first day, we decided to take it easy.
We made a U-turn and walked back to the hotel to grab my camera and some tidbits along the way, we were going to stroll to the right side of the hotel. We met some kampong kids playing, and upon casting my camera, they were happily posing for me. One of my friends started to distribute our tidbits to them, to which they happily scooped with their hands. It was not an usual tidbit, lotus seed that we bought from our last trip to Vietnam.
We walked by a nice mangrove area, saw two local female teenagers carrying basket and stick, they went deeper to the mangrove further out in the sea and collecting something, perhaps they were collecting clams. We approached to take a closer look but we would have to dip our feet to go further, anyway, we didn’t want to scare or disturbed them, so we continued strolling, enjoying the wind and the scenery, meeting some goats, dogs and pigs along the way.
We went back to the hotel to pack up some bags for our trekking tomorrow. Overall, we brought three big backpacks, one small/day backpack and one camera bag. We set aside two big backpacks for belongings that we wouldn’t need for the trekking, carrying two smaller backpacks and camera bag for trekking.
We went to the seaside wooden restaurant that we saw along the way, it was dark as we walked along the street, there were no street lights at all, eventhough we brought torchlights, we preferred to cross the street and walked along the beach again.
We sat down at one and only restaurant along the stretch that appeared to be opened, but they only had some finger food. We almost left before realized that the next restaurant also sold food. There was one auntie who was an Indonesian Chinese went out and offered us some food that was not visible in the menu. Apparently every Friday, Saturday, Sunday they served special seafood, other than that they only had two type of fried rice, smash chicken (ayam penyet), and some fries if I’m not mistaken.
We didn’t really want to order seafood, so we ordered fried rice and some calamari to go along with. We sat at a wooden table next to the shore; soon the waiter came and laid some table clothes for us. She tried to light up a candle but it was repeatedly being blown away by the wind, even before she reached our table, then she managed to come up with one nice gigantic tall glass with candle inside. Very romantic. Haha.. it helped light up the dark surrounding and for us to play poker cards while waiting for the foods.
The fried rice was nice but the calamari was rubbery, there was a doggie came by and gave us puppy eyes. So we scrapped whatever we had on our plated for him. The owner, who was a Timorese auntie came by to talk to us. Apparently the stretch of restaurant was leased free of charge to the local, although soon they would need to pay. It was a new set-ups to encourage more tourist to the area. Our hotel is located between Dili and Christo Rei (where Jesus statue is), and in this area there was almost nothing but some eateries. She told us to come back during our stays, we said ok eventhough we were not sure whether we would stay at the same place, but at least would have one more night there after the trekking.
We asked some questions about supermarket and places in Dili that we could visit. It was almost ten pm, she told us all supermarkets and kiosks were probably were closed already at that time.We would need to buy some water for our trekking, but we could always asked for some stops to supermarket along the way tomorrow.
We walked back by the beach again, cleaned up and played a new game, called ‘hunting and summoning batman mosquito’.
When we first entered our room, we encountered swarm of mosquito flying all over the place, it was everywhere and soon we were all bitten. Another good thing to travel with these friends, they are all mosquito prone, as bad as me.
The hotel provided mosquito trap light, which worked quite well but not enough. So what we did that night was to hunt mosquitos, the extra towel came in handy. First, we used our hands, burned mosquito coils although it was aircon room, then we switched to use towel which provide greater whack and wider accuracy. The friend would help us by shinning the torchlight, while me and my colleague who always have long battle with mosquitoes busy whacking them around. My colleague was very successful in whacking that we called him batman. Everytime the torch shone, he would appear there and whacked everywhere like crazy.
We had many trash bags lying around because we put our belonging inside the bag to waterproof them for mountain trekking. Black color attracted the mosquitoes to perch. So to support the batman, sometimes we had to endanger ourselves. The deal was, I would whack the trash bags, then quickly ducked when the mosquitoes would fly up and my crazy friend would whack them furiously.
It was a long battle but we also played cards along the way. We almost killed the whole empire successfully, only once in a while we saw one or two flying and they would be subjected to terror hunts once they were spotted.
We slept quite late, I think passed midnight.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
We woke up early around 6 am to take turn using the bathroom, put the bags we didn't need with the hotel and ate breakfast. The car picked us up at eight as promised but both parties didn’t inform one another, so the driver just waited for us until we showed up, which was around 8.15 since we were wondering why noone was knocking yet.
The driver’s name is Alfonso, he is a Timorese and going to be our trekking guide also. He brought us up to the supermarket. It was an unique supermarket next to a container building. The supermarket was not big but it basically had the things that we needed except eggs. See, we were fond of eggs as it goes really well with our main food, instant noodle. We had even already prepared cut-up mineral water bottle to store the eggs safely, some idea we copy from our guide in our Rinjani trekking trip.
Anyway, we just grabbed two big bottles of water; together with small bottles we got from the hotel then we continued the journey.
container supermarket
sinking boat or super high tide?The weather was quite pleasant with a lot of wind. We were pondering whether we should grab a cab to go to Dili town which was nearby only, but remembered what we read that it’s not advisable to go the town at night. Since it was our first day, we decided to take it easy.
We made a U-turn and walked back to the hotel to grab my camera and some tidbits along the way, we were going to stroll to the right side of the hotel. We met some kampong kids playing, and upon casting my camera, they were happily posing for me. One of my friends started to distribute our tidbits to them, to which they happily scooped with their hands. It was not an usual tidbit, lotus seed that we bought from our last trip to Vietnam.
We walked by a nice mangrove area, saw two local female teenagers carrying basket and stick, they went deeper to the mangrove further out in the sea and collecting something, perhaps they were collecting clams. We approached to take a closer look but we would have to dip our feet to go further, anyway, we didn’t want to scare or disturbed them, so we continued strolling, enjoying the wind and the scenery, meeting some goats, dogs and pigs along the way.
We went back to the hotel to pack up some bags for our trekking tomorrow. Overall, we brought three big backpacks, one small/day backpack and one camera bag. We set aside two big backpacks for belongings that we wouldn’t need for the trekking, carrying two smaller backpacks and camera bag for trekking.
We went to the seaside wooden restaurant that we saw along the way, it was dark as we walked along the street, there were no street lights at all, eventhough we brought torchlights, we preferred to cross the street and walked along the beach again.
We sat down at one and only restaurant along the stretch that appeared to be opened, but they only had some finger food. We almost left before realized that the next restaurant also sold food. There was one auntie who was an Indonesian Chinese went out and offered us some food that was not visible in the menu. Apparently every Friday, Saturday, Sunday they served special seafood, other than that they only had two type of fried rice, smash chicken (ayam penyet), and some fries if I’m not mistaken.
We didn’t really want to order seafood, so we ordered fried rice and some calamari to go along with. We sat at a wooden table next to the shore; soon the waiter came and laid some table clothes for us. She tried to light up a candle but it was repeatedly being blown away by the wind, even before she reached our table, then she managed to come up with one nice gigantic tall glass with candle inside. Very romantic. Haha.. it helped light up the dark surrounding and for us to play poker cards while waiting for the foods.
The fried rice was nice but the calamari was rubbery, there was a doggie came by and gave us puppy eyes. So we scrapped whatever we had on our plated for him. The owner, who was a Timorese auntie came by to talk to us. Apparently the stretch of restaurant was leased free of charge to the local, although soon they would need to pay. It was a new set-ups to encourage more tourist to the area. Our hotel is located between Dili and Christo Rei (where Jesus statue is), and in this area there was almost nothing but some eateries. She told us to come back during our stays, we said ok eventhough we were not sure whether we would stay at the same place, but at least would have one more night there after the trekking.
We asked some questions about supermarket and places in Dili that we could visit. It was almost ten pm, she told us all supermarkets and kiosks were probably were closed already at that time.We would need to buy some water for our trekking, but we could always asked for some stops to supermarket along the way tomorrow.
We walked back by the beach again, cleaned up and played a new game, called ‘hunting and summoning batman mosquito’.
When we first entered our room, we encountered swarm of mosquito flying all over the place, it was everywhere and soon we were all bitten. Another good thing to travel with these friends, they are all mosquito prone, as bad as me.
The hotel provided mosquito trap light, which worked quite well but not enough. So what we did that night was to hunt mosquitos, the extra towel came in handy. First, we used our hands, burned mosquito coils although it was aircon room, then we switched to use towel which provide greater whack and wider accuracy. The friend would help us by shinning the torchlight, while me and my colleague who always have long battle with mosquitoes busy whacking them around. My colleague was very successful in whacking that we called him batman. Everytime the torch shone, he would appear there and whacked everywhere like crazy.
We had many trash bags lying around because we put our belonging inside the bag to waterproof them for mountain trekking. Black color attracted the mosquitoes to perch. So to support the batman, sometimes we had to endanger ourselves. The deal was, I would whack the trash bags, then quickly ducked when the mosquitoes would fly up and my crazy friend would whack them furiously.
It was a long battle but we also played cards along the way. We almost killed the whole empire successfully, only once in a while we saw one or two flying and they would be subjected to terror hunts once they were spotted.
We slept quite late, I think passed midnight.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
We woke up early around 6 am to take turn using the bathroom, put the bags we didn't need with the hotel and ate breakfast. The car picked us up at eight as promised but both parties didn’t inform one another, so the driver just waited for us until we showed up, which was around 8.15 since we were wondering why noone was knocking yet.
The driver’s name is Alfonso, he is a Timorese and going to be our trekking guide also. He brought us up to the supermarket. It was an unique supermarket next to a container building. The supermarket was not big but it basically had the things that we needed except eggs. See, we were fond of eggs as it goes really well with our main food, instant noodle. We had even already prepared cut-up mineral water bottle to store the eggs safely, some idea we copy from our guide in our Rinjani trekking trip.
Anyway, we just grabbed two big bottles of water; together with small bottles we got from the hotel then we continued the journey.
container supermarket (pictures by my colleague)
We drove by the coastal scenic road to the town of Dili, and went up to the mountainous area. Dili is quite mountainous. Alfonso was very friendly and he explained to us many things about Dili along the way, stopped for us taking picture. He showed us from high up of Dili hill the Saint Cruz cemetery where victims of 1991 massacre were burried,. He also brought us to a very small museum on the cliff along the way which was opened free for public. He shared stories about the difficulties of Timorese people, about the unrest, the questionable UN role and the ironic gift from former Indonesian president, the Jesus statue. It’s certainly different to hear directly from first hand local.
Our destination is the town of Maubisse, for first stop. The town is located at 1400 meter above sea level, therefore the weather was pleasant and cool. In Maubisse, you can find Catholic church, busy markets, eateries etc. People from surrounding village would come on horse and park their horses in the fields. When we started to climb the higher altitude, we saw more of village life, people selling crops along the way, the prominent one that caught my attention was the Siamese pumpkin (labu Siam, I'm not sure whether it's correct to translate it to Siamese pumpkin literally), it's obvious that it's self grown because each kiosks only sold about ten over pumpkin, that's it. Sometimes they had other things to sell, probably from their own garden too, like banana, cauliflowers etc, we also saw familiar road side petrol kiosk that sold petrol in bottles.
Dili from high hill, overlooking Saint Cruz cemetery
gorgeous padi field along the way
We drove by the coastal scenic road to the town of Dili, and went up to the mountainous area. Dili is quite mountainous. Alfonso was very friendly and he explained to us many things about Dili along the way, stopped for us taking picture. He showed us from high up of Dili hill the Saint Cruz cemetery where victims of 1991 massacre were burried,. He also brought us to a very small museum on the cliff along the way which was opened free for public. He shared stories about the difficulties of Timorese people, about the unrest, the questionable UN role and the ironic gift from former Indonesian president, the Jesus statue. It’s certainly different to hear directly from first hand local.
Our destination is the town of Maubisse, for first stop. The town is located at 1400 meter above sea level, therefore the weather was pleasant and cool. In Maubisse, you can find Catholic church, busy markets, eateries etc. People from surrounding village would come on horse and park their horses in the fields. When we started to climb the higher altitude, we saw more of village life, people selling crops along the way, the prominent one that caught my attention was the Siamese pumpkin (labu Siam, I'm not sure whether it's correct to translate it to Siamese pumpkin literally), it's obvious that it's self grown because each kiosks only sold about ten over pumpkin, that's it. Sometimes they had other things to sell, probably from their own garden too, like banana, cauliflowers etc, we also saw familiar road side petrol kiosk that sold petrol in bottles.
Dili from high hill, overlooking Saint Cruz cemetery
gorgeous padi field along the wayWent through a lot of winding road going up the hills, I started to feel giddy. It was about three and a half hour to Maubisse. Three of us dozed off a bit in the car, eventhough I tried not to sleep because it made me more giddy. So when Alfonso offered us to stop by for a drink in Maubisse, I totally went for it, we also needed some toilet break.
When we entered the town, I was not really in great condition to look around, it was quite a busy 'town', we passed by market where there were locals, shops, some crowds etc. The place where we stopped by was a wooden restaurant with some seats, quite spacious. My two friends ordered coffee while I ordered some tea. Timor coffee is strong but there is some slightly sour taste. I went to the toilet and saw something that can't be unseen, luckily there was another toilet.
The tea break was good; I pooped in motion sicknesss pill although I think it’s a bit too late. Alfonso ordered lunch for us for the Pousada de Maubisse. Pousada de Maubisse is a rest house located in Maubisse, which is the pass over before going to Hato Bulico where we would start our climb. It could be an option of staying overnight if you want to spend more time exploring Maubisse more.
When we entered the place, there were two rows of rooms on both sides. After that we would pass by a garden with surrounding 360 view before we entered the big house. There was a rustic fire place in the living room, or maybe more suitable to be called dining room. The place was empty and cold when no one was around. The fire place was nice; the whole space was spacious but quite old. We saw a sitting room with two stretch of long sofa, there was a clean toilet with full big bucket of water and a lot of toilet paper, just like what I hoped for. This would be our last stop for toilet and I also felt very nauseous because of the car ride. There went my breakfast but I felt much better afterward. Damn motion sickness.
row of rooms in Pousada de Maubisse
the rustic fireplace
view from Pousada de Maubisse garden
RamelauWe explored around, the sun was very hot as it was just passed mid day, we saw the kitchen, located outside the house, we also explored the garden and finally settled ourselves in the dining table. Eventhough we had already ordered about an hour ago, they still needed long time to prepare for the food. We only asked for some vegetables and omelets, they gave us salad too. The food was simple and good. Although feeling better after settling down, I pooped another pill as we needed another hour to reach Hato Bulico.
Going up another winding road, the scenery was very nice along the way, we passed by padi field, local houses that look exactly like African tribe Massai, where they use twig, clay, thatch and mud or even cow dung to build. I never imagine I would see very similar Massai house here, we could also see stretch of similar twig fences, passed by streams and greenery with Mount Ramelau as the background. It was covered in cloud. From earlier since we reached cool higher altitude, we left our window open wide to let the wind stroke our hairs and faces, I was one step away from sticking out my whole head and waved my tongue, like a doggie. However, the wind was quite cold.
Quite soon, I fell asleep because of the side effect of the pills, so I missed some of the good scenery in the picture. Soon after we made a stop in one abandoned building with very gorgeous white wildflowers. The wildflowers were so pretty, combined with abandoned building it created gorgeous unique looks. Alfonso was trying to look for some porter to help him carry his things. He brought tents, sleeping bags and some portions of water. We also brought water, foods and our personal belongings.
While we spent sometimes there waiting for him, there were two local teenage girls sitting under the tree, and we exchanged snapping pictures. They were more willing to snap our pictures with their handphones, yup, so much for technology. They could be local tourists maybe, because we didn’t see any local (except those in business) bother to use mobile phone freely.
We left the area without porter, went through a beautiful field where there was a house with horses. This time Alfonso clinched the deal and he got a horse as a porter, followed by two local boys, the owner of the horse. The older boy was merely 14 years old, and his brother could only be around 10 years old. These boys live in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
We drove up for a little bit more, there were some landslides along the way, the road was so steep we had problem once in a while. We finally reached the last point of Hato Bulico where we need to start climbing. Alfonso would just leave the car there, he loaded his backpacks to the horses and off we went.
Mount Ramelau or Tatamailau (local language means Grandfather of all) is the highest mountain in Timor Leste and also Timor Island. In Portuguese colonial days it was also the highest mountain of Portugal and the whole of Portuguese empire. Sanding at 2963 meter (9721 feet), this mountain is dedicated to Virgin Mary, there is a three meter statue of Virgin Mary in the summit, erected during Indonesia rule in 1997.
Annual pilgrimage is done here, there was one a well formed track for this purpose but now it has been severely degraded with massive washouts requiring major detour.
It was around 3 pm. Our activities for the rest of the day was to climb up and reach the chapel point, enjoyed sunset, and stayed overnight in the mountain. We would scale up another track to reach the summit tomorrow morning to enjoy the sunrise. We started up by putting on our windbreaker and headwear, the wind was blowing hard. It was not a good climbing season as we were in rainy season; there were no other climbers around, not a single soul. Our starting point was deserted.
There was a circular water pond and huge gate before we stumbled into staircases, many and many, hundreds of steps of stone staircases; those were the start of our track.
I don’t like to walk up staircases to the mountain, it’s more tiring than walking up the natural earth slope. So whenever I could, I preferred to walk on the side of the stairs, which was actually the path for horses, as long as I avoided all those shits on the ground, it’s fine with me.
Maybe we started up at high altitude, 2053 meter, my body had not adjusted to it, maybe it was the staircases, the previous motion sickness and the lack of training (excuses, excuses) I felt very tired after those hundreds of staircases that I needed two stops for resting. My only fear was that my recurring low blood pressure would come and visit, that would screw up everything. Luckily, after we got back to natural track (damn staircases) I was feeling much better and we were able to continue the rest of the journey without resting.
We faced up with big field of meadow, and spectacular green slope with cut-off trees. The cut-off trees didn’t sound good, but with the green slope, perfect blue sky and history behind the place, it was uniquely breathtaking. The trees was chopped and burned by Indonesia military to prevent local resistance from hiding and ambushing them. It has bitter history, each and every single time I had this guilty feeling to the Timorese by just being Indonesian. What about those countries who has more blood in their hands?
The terrain was earth rocky terrain, sometimes the track was misty but most of the time we had good visibility and good view. It was cold but we didn’t really feel so if we continued walking. According to what I read, it needs 3-4 hours for a healthy person to climb up, Alfonso also gave us the estimation of three and a half hour, so when he said we were half an hour away, I didn’t buy it, but of course I was happy. It was quite a tiring climb for all of us, but we could already see the disappearing green into the sky, it’s near!
Alfonso also pointed out it was actually closer but the track was too steep to scale, we needed to do some detouring, but we indeed finished the climb in less than two hours, that’s great and much shorter than expected. To be fair, we still half an hour to the summit, but the estimation time was to reach the place we were. Wow.. I didn’t think that we went that fast, in fact I worried that I held them up a bit when we first started at the staircases.
When we reached the chapel by the meadow (don’t google this, I name it myself) we didn’t expect to see a wooden chapel there. The feeling was quite surreal. We were walking among the mist, the wind was very strong and we could feel the chills digging into our skin. Then through the steep terrain, we stepped upon open field, still misty, and there stood black dark wooden chapel a distance away, half of it was covered by fog, and the rest was totally black in color.
We were all surprise about the simple building, but soon we were very very grateful.
We needed to climb up a few narrow plank of staircase to the ‘lobby’ area, there was a fixed natural table when Alfonso put his things. It was made of tree trunk and bark. Once we stopped walking, we started to shiver, badly. We quickly put back our windbreaker and scarf/headgear.
Inside there was a small room with nothing, and two tiny rooms with ‘mezzanine’, just a wooden area about one meter high, something like a big shelf. In every tiny room there was a squatting toilet with nothing else. We decided not to use them, because we didn’t have anything to flush it and it was open, just next to the room.
Behind there was a small area slightly lower than the building and surrounding earth. The local kids started to make fire, we helped out with our solid fuel to make it easier because everything was wet. Even so, it was a challenge to light it up without being blown by the wind. Alfonso started to make coffee.
Accompanied by my colleague, we went out to look for natural toilet. The chapel was located in this nice meadow. We walked away further where we could find more tree and shrub and I found the best natural toilet on earth, possibly. So this green path was surrounded by tree and shrub, you would feel protected yet you can enjoy the scenery very well. I just needed to pee since Hato Bulico ha… of course I had collected a small rock for the purpose of not having big business on the mountain, which always works for me. This time my colleague also carried one because he had way too many business in Rinjani, so he wanted to try my method.
We took turn to look out for each other from distance away, it was freezing cold as the rain started to drop, the wind was blowing like crazy. Three of us had to jump around while waiting for the fire. We set up our tent, I would have one personal tent and they both would share a tent. We set it up in the open lobby, but as the wind blow, it looked like impossible to stay there, so we moved both tent into a room, mine occupied the mezzanine and the guys just below, next to me.
Alfonso also set up his tent in the room. It was way too windy to put the room in the outside lobby, even inside the room, it was still freezing.
To add to everything, the rain started to pour, it was heavy and soon the surrounding was all misty and disappearing into the fogs. I asked Alfonso whether we could probably found some place for the horse, since it was standing under the rain and looked pityful. Alfonso told me there was no need to, apparently the horse was tied with very long rope, he was free to roam around.
Alfonso gave us a gas stove to use, but the fire was too slow to boil water. It didn’t keep up with the surrounding’s coldness. We went outside and tried to get the fire going, all the while we were all freezing like crazy. The guys also got bitten on their hands by some insects; I had some cream I always carried around which came in handy. We prepared our torchlight and food, putting our cooking tin outside to collect some rainwater so that we could heat up our can foods.
Alfonso was ready with his local coffee and distributed to us, it was nice to been able to warm our hands with the cup, and eventhough we might burn our tongue, we wouldn’t know.
The fire was finally up, everywhere around us was already pitch dark. We started boiling water on the fire, desperately blowing and fanning the fire all we might. We used one big metal bowl and dumped in 5 packs of our instant noodle, it was all that we had. There was no sign that they rest brought any food, and there were six mouths to feed.
It took forever for the water to boil and heated up the can. We all sat closely near the fire, but the heat was not really enough as we were all shivering, I couldn’t even feel my finger anymore, I could say this was probably the coldest I had even been, much colder than Rinjani even though Rinjani stood up much higher. The temperature could drop to zero degree from what I read, but above all, the wind was the killing factor, and it didn’t help that it was raining too. We tried to warm our selves up, putting hands against the fire, we couldn’t really feel it even when the fire licked our finger. The ground sheet that we bought, we used to cover ourselves, and there was no way we were going to take off our shoes.
setting up tent, while rainstorm started picking up outside
and it was pouring.....(pictures by my colleague)
dinner preparation that took forever to boil(pictures by my colleague)
firepit area, lower than chapel and surrounding earth, but it was still freezing.....(pictures by my colleague)
amber (pictures by my colleague)
When the noodle was ready, it really seemed that we needed to share because there was really no sign of food. We were told to bring for ourselves, but we couldn’t let them go through the night without eating anything. So we scooped for everyone. One serving was enough for me, I didn’t really have the appetite, but I needed the warmth. We also share the baked bean and peanut. After meal, we made another round of boiling water to get some sweet tea for me and coffee for the guys.
We gather in the fire for sometimes, reluctant to leave. We couldn’t sit still as we had to constantly rub our hands. Everytime we left the fire, it was quite an agony, we needed to jump around.
Finally we decided to go inside the guy’s tent to play cards. We needed to kill sometimes before going to sleep. We played with our torchlight hung up in the middle of the tent, sharing stories and laughter. It got better inside the tent but everytime we went out to get something, the air was chilling. Brrrrrrrr…….
Around eleven, we called it a day. I went back to my tent, the two nice gentlemen gave me a lot of advices, do not hesitate to call us up should you need to go out, toilet break or anything. I could feel the crazy temperature in just a mere less than a meter distance between tents, so I rushed like mad to unroll my sleeping bag, laid down the mattress and quickly crawled inside. I had my backpack as pillow, fully protected head with my buff with additional head cover from the windbreaker. It was the first ever that I slept like that, literally all night with my head and body completely covered, still, it was freezing.
We had difficulty sleeping, about half an hour after silence, the guys called out to check whether I was okay. I had not slept yet, but started to doze. Apparently my colleague heard someone walking and thought it was me who needed to go out. I felt very grateful to have them around.
I couldn’t sleep well at all, constantly woke up because it was too cold, eventhough I curled into a ball inside sleeping bag, it was still chilling to the bone. Sometimes pass midnight, I was awaken by the commotion outside, we heard the local kids and probably Alfonso speaking and running around, but we didn’t understand what they were saying. The guys called me to make sure I was okay. The commotion lasted for a while and everything went quiet again, we didn’t know what happened, all I had in mind was thinking how could they sleep through the night with only a jacket on their body, and how the horse in the cold outside.
I woke up again not long after, hearing the sound of pouring rain and strong wind. We were inside a building, inside the tent, inside sleeping bag, mind you, but we could feel the wind, and I swore, when I stretched out my hand, I felt some very fine water dripping. My tent had only one layer, it might not be totally waterproof, so it’s possibly that some rainwater snuck up inside. With the sound of water, I felt the urgency of full bladder, but I didn’t want to trouble the guys as they wouldn't let me go alone too, and there was no way I could go out without waking them up. They were also restless and kept waking up the whole night.
It was quite cramp in the tent, if I stretched my leg, my feet would hit the tent my my head would came out from sleeping back, cold. If I curled into a ball, I got the warmth, sore legs, but still cold. He he..
Monday, 21 February 2011
Finally the morning broke; it was around 6 am, the time we supposed to start the climb. I heard sounds from the fire area behind, my alarm also had gone off.
Slowly, I went out from the tent, greeted by the still icy coldness. The rain had stopped; I think it rained all night. I tried to climb soundless from the wooden mezzanine, wore my shoes, tip toed pass the guy’s tent. Armed with torch light, I wanted to visit my natural toilet.
It was still dark outside, but there was glimpse of light, the morning was really beautiful, wet and stunning. It was a distance away to my spot, where I could look down the valley and saw that the orange light has broken. Sunrise is here.
I quickly did my business and ran back to my tent, the guys had already woke up as I could hear them talking. We talked for a while and I grabbed my camera. I went out to the meadow again, took pictures and sat there enjoying the morning light. I didn’t mind that we couldn’t make the sunrise up the mountain, after the crazy last night; actually all of us were talking that if it’s too cold and tasking to go up, it was alright not to.
But the morning was so beautiful; luckily, the guys came out, well prepared with all their jackets and head gears. In fact, none of us took them off last night. Alfonso also came out and we all started to walk up to the summit.
my pathetic attempt to capture the moonlight..
The terrain was relatively easy, with rocky earth, but like yesterday, some parts were very slippery because of algae growing on some smooth compacted earth, killing combination.
It was still quite tiring to walk up as we could feel the thin air. The surrounding was wet with morning mist and perhaps the leftover of the heavy rain last night. When we walked, the coldness became tolerable but we didn’t need to take off our jackets, although all of our headscarves had been tucked on the neck only or hands.
I notice there were wooden cross on the edge of the cliff along the way, my guess and confirmed by Alfonso those are for be the route they use for Jalan Salib, known also as Jalan Penderitaan, Via Diolorosa or Station of the Cross or Way of Sorrows. It’s the depiction of the final hours (or Passion) of Jesus, extended throughout Roman Catholic Church, commonly done on Good Friday.
The stations in the church usually consists of 14 pictures, or in some landmark like here Mount Ramelau there are very simple crosses made of tree branches along the way. It’s barely noticeable, planted on the edge of the cliffs, humbly stood against the wind and morning mists.
The end of the track was to the direction of northeast, as the sun shone majestically on our diagonal right. It ended with some flight of stone staircases overgrown by moss and white wildflower. From there we could see the statue of the Virgin Mary, standing alone, accompanied by the cooling wind.
We walked by the edge of the cliff to enjoy the sun and the open sky, before climbed up the staircase and stood face to face with Virgin Mary. She was gorgeous with the sun shinning just behind her. So here we were at the summit of Mount Ramelau or Tatamailau, the highest point of Timor Leste, with the peaceful quietness and no one around, feeling really grateful that I had many chances to visit world’s gorgeous high grounds these two years.
We stood there, barely speaking, just enjoyed the stillness of the feeling and the dynamic of the wind that again made us curled, although it was nice cooling instead of agonizing freeze. We stood at the stone edges, looking over the valley with many white wildflowers around us.
If anything changed, I had replaced my favorite flower. It used to be blue tulips that I only seen once when I got married, it’s unique, pretty and unusual. I still like it, but it’s been replaced with these white wildflowers. They grow anywhere, they make something simple pretty, they are swaying with the wind, thrive and embrace the peace and open sky. How nice.
Once day I shall have a field full of them, it doesn’t matter how wild looking, unkept and messy they are, to me, they look happy with their freedom and beautiful in very unique way.
We spent sometimes there before started to head down. I’m not the fan of going down, but after last year, I got least problem and not scared anymore, eventhough I could still fall. Like, bum, I fell once when I faced my least favorite terrain, smooth compacted earth with algae. It was a light fall, as in it reduced to a squat with slightly touch on the buttock.. get it? We continued to go down, our friend is afraid of height, so he took a bit more time to go down, anyway, we took our time to enjoy the scenery.
Reaching the chapel, everyone was in high spirit; however, we were really wondering if there was enough food for everyone. It bothered us a bit if Alfonso would climb with no preparation of food, especially for the two kids who were already started the fire. Luckily, he did bring some food, took out his biscuit and instant noodles and offered to us.
chapel by the meadow
we have no idea what it is...
gorgeous meadow...We didn’t want to cook instant noodle anymore, we brought some cake, 5 cakes, 4 for three of us (with my colleague being cake lover) and one for Alfonso. We ended up giving the extra cake to the kids. We also made cream mushroom soup (instant lah.. we couldn’t possibly pick up mushrooms from wet tree logs? - hmmmm… considering) which tasted very good against the cold morning. We also had some biscuits that we brought and Alfonso made us coffee.
We hung around by the fire for a while, packing up our tents, taking pictures, then realized than we could actually see the statue of the Virgin Mary from the meadow, it looked small and lonely up there. We needed to say goodbye.
Scaling the down road was quite a challenge to our friend, but I admired his determination, it needs courage to face up to your fear, to find out how far you could go, climbing and going down a mountain when you have fear of height is definitely not for faint hearted, especially that he also fell down and there were places when the paths were narrow with cliff on one side.
My colleague walked in front, our friend in the middle and I was the sweeper. This colleague of mine has monkey feet and he is especially very good in going down, moved like monkey and never failed to enjoy himself at the same time. Ironically, he was the one who had a massive fall on the buttock at the end of the journey, but this was indeed one of the slipperiest mountains I had been.
The weather was good, the sky was gorgeously blue, provided picture perfect background, the sun was shinning strongly above our heads. As usual, I forgot sunblock when I needed to, we could feel the sun digging into our skin. All of us had taken off our jackets and whatever since almost the beginning of the track.
There was a big chopper circling around the mountain. According to my friends who are still in the army, the chopper was equipped with missile. It kept coming back to us; perhaps they were suspicious that there were some people climbing the mountain during rainy season.
We just ignored the chopper and visually pampered by the surrounding.
This time, I had my single pouch camera bag in front of me, it’s much easier to take out compared to Rinjani, where I missed a lot of nice scenery, however, it was still tedious compared to snappy compact camera.
We finally reached the staircase area, of course going down was a breeze compared to climbing up, spent sometimes looking at the plants around because Alfonso was busy pumping air to the tires. We wandered some distance away from the car then boarded when it went downhill.
No mistake, I had pooped two pills since before we reached Hato Bulico, I expected to sleep like a log in a car, so did the two guys. As the matter of facts, none of us slept more than twenty minutes I guess. I tried to snap the scenery I missed on the way up, including the fascinating African look alike local houses. Same as the coming journey, we were also greeted on the road by friendly villagers.. Bondia, means good morning in Tetum language and Botarde means good afternoon.
We stopped by Pousada de Maubisse again for lunch, this time Alfonso had placed our orders since we were still in the chapel by the meadow, they should had good two three hours to prepare and yet.. we need to wait for more than an hour for the meal after we arrived. We even paid a visit few times to the kitchen, it seemed like they cooked with firewood, but it still took much much longer than it should have to serve the simple meal of vegetables and eggs. We actually ordered chicken too but seemed like it slipped out, chicken ran away. Eventhough they again gave us fork and knife to eat rice with, we had good meal and got what we had been wanted, ice coke.
After meal, we proceeded again to the scenic journey, rolling down our window to enjoy the wind. It was very misty and foggy on the way, at some points we couldn’t see beyond ten meters in front of us. Again, we asked Alfonso to drop us in Dili supermarket. We bought some chips, more instant noodle for the island, water, coke and juices for later. After saying goodbye to Alfonso, we checked in to the same hotel, same room, in fact, we accidentally brought the key up to the mountain.
We took turn clean up, and now I honestly confused what we did for the rest of the day. Did we stroll around in the beach? Did we play card in the hotel? I think both. I remember that we went back to the restaurant but there was nothing much to eat as it was weekday, they only served nasi goreng and smashed chicken, so we had dinner in hotel’s restaurant.
The very good thing about this hotel beside the cleanliness was, they provided laundry for free! It was literally the whole package of laundry, unlimited. We passed them the clothes, it would be back to us on the same day, clean and ironed. It was great that we could wash all our laundries especially dirty mountain clothing, if not; we might have clothing shortage for the rest of holiday. We did our planning for tomorrow, we should go to fisherman pier to look for boat that would bring us to Autaro Island the day after tomorrow, we also arranged to drop by car rental for self drive, and secured additional night of hotel stay tomorrow night.
There were enough mosquitoes in the room to summon crazy monkey Batman, although luckily not as many as the first night. We only had two channels in the hotel, one was Australian channel that show some drama, the other was BBC World News that repeated and repeated again. We became quite well versed in what happened around the world, especially Egypt, Libya unrest and NZ Earthquake at that time.
Good thing travelling with the guys, we always had tea and soup break for supper. We had fun playing card, they called it ta-ti, I don’t know how to spell it, I call it Chinese poker. Singaporean played it a bit differently with my method, but three of us also invented more creative version that resulted in our card being damaged. Ha..
We found a lonely planet book about Dili in the hotel, and it was in our hostage for the rest of the trip. Funny, we actually tried to look for it in Singapore library and bookshop, but never found it. It was a very thin book, and not much additional information than we already knew.
We called the night before midday, for the rest that we really needed.
Tuesday, 22 February 2011
We woke up early around 7 o’clock, had some good breakfast in the hotel. The mie goreng with fried egg was our favorite menu there. Okay, we were full of noodle for this trip and we didn’t mind. My colleague also brought his favorite bakkwa, or dried preserved pork meat that we enjoyed throughout the trip. We would bake, toast, fried or even burn it in bon-fire to complete our meals.
After breakfast, one of the hotel staffs sent us to Timor Lodge where we could pick up car rental. The other good thing about this hotel was, they were willing to help you and not calculative about sending the guests when we needed them to.
Timor Lodge was actually quite near, straight from our hotel, but we needed to do detour here and there because there was a one-way street segment. It was quite confusing and we were not very sure if we could trace back the road.
The car rental area was quite well organized. Everything was computerized, but not everyone could speak English. We also couldn’t get a map from them and had a bit of lost in translation. But all went well, we picked up Toyota Rav4 3 door for USD85 per day.
Originally we left this day open for either diving or driving. Since the tourism in Timor Leste was not well developed yet, it’s kind of difficult to visit good dive site in Autaro Island. We would stay in Autaro Island for 3 days, but to dive there we actually had to book from Dili, that made it complicated and expensive. So we limited our option to just dive in Dili if we could. However, during our stay, we didn’t see a single dive boat or divers on the shore of Dili. It’s either we missed them or because it was rainy season, so at the end we decided to go for diving with R or self driving.
From the car rental area, my colleague started off driving, two of them sitting in front; I had all the back seat for myself. It was a tiny car anyway.
We started to do blind navigation, basically tried to go to Maubara town, at West Coast of Dili. After that we would then decide whether there was still enough time to go to Baucau at East Coast.
From Timor Lodge we turned left and heading to the roundabout. It was really hot that day but we were all excited. After a while we back to the coastal area and excited to see the sea again, there was also big field with an interesting looking church. We stopped the car and walked out to take pictures.
view from restaurant we stopped by to cool down; having nice latte, ice tea, fish and chipsI kept myself alert, not to be complacent to test out the situation in the town of Dili. We caught attention everywhere we went because we didn't looke like Timorese, Caucassian and even Indonesian. We crossed the road and walked to the sea area and I was getting more relaxed as everything seemed okay and fine.
We continued our journey and reached the place called Bazartete. I hope I remember correctly, in Bazartete, when we were enjoying the view of the sea on the right, and there was some point when we saw water body on the left, sometimes it disappeared behind some houses or greenery, but there was a point when it was just next to the road, we looked for some access, went in, parked the car, and walked out.
It was a nice mangrove stretch where we could walk and noone was around. How nice it was to have all these natural places where we could just drop by anytime, and enjoyed a stroll without crowd, it's definitely something we can't do in developed places, or exploited places. Civilization often takes too many things for granted.
As usual, me and my colleague tried to do some monkey things by climbing some tree, we didn't really climb, as we didn't want to hurt ourselves in the trip. Our friend just shook his head, by this point, he had very well understood that if you found someone weird and crazy in your life, there's a chance that there is still another one somewhere somehow. And he is the lucky one to meet and travel with both of us! Haha..
We walked around, avoiding some cow dung, met group of cows resting under the trees, squatting by the mangrove watching some boys swimming in the water from far and some villagers putting some fish trap (I suppose) in the water. If it was striking hot previously, walked around the mangrove was pleasant because of the wind breeze and shades of the trees.
We went back to the car and proceed to district of Liquica, basically the clue in the map only show that we could reach Maubara by passing through Bazartete and Liquica, but that's enough. The road sign was very minimalist but as long as we followed it, with a bit of trying to catch some clue along the way and asking for direction, we would be fine.
There were not many 'architecture' to see along the way, which was very fine by me! Screw architectures I’d prefer to see trees, greeneries, sea and sky anytime. We saw some villager's hut; basically the road was quite empty and quiet. There was one diversion of the road because of some construction, we also passed by some colorful houses where we asked for direction, and saw bunch and bunch of school kids with different uniforms but never really saw the school. I think it's common for the school kids to walk a distance, probably few kilometers to go to their school. We literally saw school children with same uniform few kilometers apart.
We stopped by again at some beach with some patches of wildflower. It's located next to local kiosk, where we bought some fried banana. No, not pisang goreng, but sliced fried banana put in plastic. We bought one pack for 50 cents, it tasted quite raw and not sweet.
When we finally reached the town of Maubara, we went around in car for a while, then decided to U-turn back so that we had enough time to go to East Coast. We drove by same coastal area, in fact, I might miss some sequences, like some of the places we dropped by could be happened on the way back.
The tide was quite high, we watched in amazement looking at the sea water bursting through the vegetation on the seaside, drowning some in process as if it was aquatic plants, the sight was pretty though.
This time our friend was driving, we saw a big stretch of beautiful beach and made a request to go down and took pictures. He didn't want to go down this time, he was being quite understanding and caught our excitement in taking pictures although he is not into it at all.
The beach was actually inside some metal hoarding, it was concealed for some construction site, but parts of the hoarding were falling apart so we could go in. Once we were out the car, my colleague ran like crazy upon seeing the sea, as if we didn't see the sea along the way! But his excitement was contagious and I also ran to the sea. Reason being, we wanted to enjoy the scenery but didn't want to make our friend waited too long. I think so. Or maybe he was just an energetic hyper sugar loaded monkey.
We picked up some rocks from the shore, some nice shaped rocks, took pictures, enjoyed for a while, and ran back to the car. By now, the weather was already quite pleasant as it was not as hot anymore.
We continued our journey, but unfortunately, we encountered an accident along the way.
There was a van parked on one lane, it was a two way lane road. However, the van was not parked properly as the back was sticking out so much into the lane two, and we hit it.
I saw it coming, but thee was not enough time to warn them. It made loud crack sound; we lost control a bit but quickly managed to stop the car. Both guys went out, I stayed in the car. The left side was scratched, with those black parts came off, the car was dented and there were some bad scratches, basically the whole left sides didn't look good. The guys were talking to the locals looking at the vans; I just crossed my finger that everything was fine and hoped they didn't stay long as there were more locals came out, attracted to the commotion. The guys tried to put back the black parts, or just attached them as we could, and off we went.
We had the same idea that the longer we stayed, the more trouble we might invited. So after make sure that it's fine, both parties's mistakes, we quickly drove away, my colleague was back in the driver's seat.
We checked out with each other that everyone was fine, and talked up our friend who was feeling guilty, it's part and parcel of travelling, in fact, we should be grateful that we were all safe and sound. Things could go much worse.
We decided not to drive up to Baucau anymore, we went to the fisherman's pier to try to book some boat to go Autaro island tomorrow.
By researching here and there, we already knew that there were some options that we could take, speed boat charter, which only available every Saturday and Tuesday, or some water taxi we needed to book, it was said to cost USD$ 30 per pax, but I kind of doubt they would charge that amount if there were only three passengers, I had feeling they would charge more, although I never knew. Why I thought so, because for comparison, if we charter a boat, it cost USD 800 a boat.
So we opted for another option, easier and confirmed that it’s available daily by request, using fisherman's boat, $10 each pax. We needed to negotiate directly with the fisherman face to face, with all fishermen basically only understood Tetum. Well, that could be the fun of it.
We went down to the pier; there were no fishermen in the afternoon so we approached a group of army-clad locals who were sitting around there. They told us we should drop by in the morning around 7am to catch the fishermen, another person who we asked also told us the same thing.
With those information, we went back to our hotel which was quite near the fisherman pier to freshen up and tried to call the rental shop to arrange the return of the car.
Change of plan. Since we needed to go so early in the morning, the car rental would not be opened before that time, they only opened at 8 am. So we needed to return the car that very afternoon, before the shop closed. However, upon calling them, it didn't seem like they understood that we were going to drop by and to wait for us. Anyway, we just went ahead and drove there. Magically, three of us managed to navigate successfully going through twists and bends, but, the shop was already closed.
Okay then, our itinerary could always flexible. We would still go to fisherman pier in the morning, see what deal we could get, it would be best if we could take the boat after we returned the car. If we couldn’t sail that day, there was always the day after. We would return the car in the morning and for tonight we could still use it.
We dropped by another hotel along the way, we had been eyeing this hotel everytime we passed by and wanted to try them as alternate when we came back to Dili after Autaro Island. We did some research back then, but didn’t remember why we didn’t choose this hotel. Upon parking, we knew the reason. The hotel looked new from outside, but from inside, we could see that everything was quite run down. It was also quite expensive, with the same price, we were more than happy to stay at California. Anyway, we saw many UN cars in the parking lots and big group of tourists just walked in. Personally, but I also wrote this in behalf of three of us, we preferred to stay in quieter place like our hotel, with us being the loudest. Ha..
Leaving that hotel, Cristo Rei was the destination, it was near to our hotel, we could see the statue everyday from the beach or restaurant, we could also passed by One dollar beach and Areia Branca beach, as recommended by the lonely planet book.
While both beaches were not East Timor best beaches (if you have enough time in Dili, make arrangement to go to Jaco Island for recommended beach, we didn’t have enough time to go that far).
Cristo Rei was erected during Indonesia occupation, there were mixed feelings about this statue; as present and as ironic political agenda. I went there with mixed feelings too. Upon entering the entrance, there was huge but empty parking lot and we saw long staircases leading to the top, there were 500 steps to climb if you intended to go up. The staircase was built further inside, a distance away from the carpark, it looked deserted. There was another Way of Sorrow path along the wall of the staircases.
We just walked around the edge of the cliff, attracted more to the open sky and the breaking waves. The wave must had been so great that it took big part of some retaining wall away, all the while splashing and tried to get to us. We saw many crabs on the rocks and what appeared to be silvery dark grey fish clinging onto the rock. Yah, I know it sounded weird. I don’t know what they were, there were not mud-rock skipper, but they were certainly looked like fish. We squatted around, looking down trying to see them, carefully standing on the edge of broken retaining wall. Everytime the wave splashed, all the rocks and funny fish would disappear under the water for a while.
We walked toward the end of the cliff, where there was no more path available. Above us, on the higher cliff, was the statue of the Christ, spreading his hands wide beyond the pale blue sky. It was almost sunset, I didn’t have my camera with me, on the plus side, I could just enjoy the scenery.
We also found some nice white colored rock, flattened and shaped by erosion I guess. There were a few locals and tourists around. We saw some Caucassian tourists jogged along the coastal, as usual.
Christo Rei (picture by my colleague)
broken retaining wall
(picture by my colleague)
broken retaining wall (picture by my colleague)
sunset from Areia Branca beach(picture by my colleague)
We drove back, along the way there, there were some restaurants. Our first choice was Blue Ocean, what looked like a simple small restaurant, decorated with blue paint and many sea shells. They had a lot of variety of menus, however, there were only two locals attending to us and none of them understood simple English. They didn’t even understand their own menu when we tried to point what we wanted. We tried a few times with other menu options with same result and finally decided to give up.
There was another place, called Caz Bar, I think it used to be the only restaurant as it was the only one that appeared in Lonely Planet book. (I actually hardly used travel book, only recent trips with my colleague, I peeked and read along the trip. It could be interesting and contains useful info like how to read numbers in foreign languages when we needed to, or some info about places. However, I still find them not always practical and accurate; I’m not the fan of it. On the other hand, it could come in handy for certain situation in remote areas).
When we went in Caz Bar open parking area, we saw a lot of UN cars. Our aim was actually to eat at the next restaurant, a very nice natural looking two storey restaurant.
We walked up there, it was nicely decorated and looked very posh, African theme and we were greeted by a pretty African lady. When we looked at the menu, the price was very high so we excused ourselves and went back to Caz Bar. At that time, we were thinking about the car damage that we needed to pay, credit card was hardly used in here, we only had limited amount of cash, above all, we didn’t want to splurge on expensive food.
Went inside Caz Bar, the restaurant was empty, we requested to be served in the gazebo in front of the beach, after ordering. The price was much cheaper, which was the reasonable prices, but most of their menu was western and Italian. Somehow, three of us wanted to eat Italian food that night. I ordered Spaghetti Bolognese. The other two ordered something I’m not remember., some pasta and some carbonara blablablibli.. We ordered Avocado and Orange Juices too, and one dish for all, a very weird dish called Antichoke someotherblablablibli. None of us knew about this dish before, we basically chose it based on what was inside (Olive and some other vegetables). Our friend is a vegetarian, and two of us didn’t mind something vegetable at all.
When they prepared our order, we played with football machine and had few games with it. My colleague came out as the winner, no price given. It was quite fun to play with that machine although basically the game involved a lot of accidental shot and suicide goal. Since my colleague was the most obnoxious and monkey-like, two of us played against him, yet we still lost. Haha.. We then walked out to the beach and wanted to settle on the gazebo, but it was dark now, the sun had set, there were no lightings and our nemesis, mosquitoes had been spotted around, so we decided to eat at the restaurant.
Our food was quite nice, but the creamy taste was too strong for us that two of us only managed to finish half, despite us being very hungry. We also chose the wrong drink to go with spaghetti, as the avocado juice tasted great but it overwhelmed the overall taste. When the antichoke came, we almost choke; it was arrangement of vegetable that we hardly recognize beside olive. I believe the dish was either came from Germany or French? Nevermind. The vegetables all tasted funny, to our Asian tongue. It’s either sour or something unexplainable, luckily it didn’t choke us. We barely ate quarter of the serving.
We went back to the hotel and packed up our bag again. Same drill. We again, booked for another night, which would be our last night, when we came back from Autaro. We would also keep one bag in the hotel, filled with stuff we wouldn’t need for Autaro. This time we carried one huge backpack, two smaller backpacks and camera bag. They were mostly consisted of cooking equipment, food items, water, shoes, masks, snorkels, some personal belongings. We had packed them waterproof, with a layer of trash bag or plastic bag inside. We also got our poncho on easy to reach location. We were ready!!!
As usual, we had card game, each time we add more invention and made the game more interesting. It was always fun, if we didn’t laugh enough, this trip sure made it up for the whole year of recommended laughing dosage.
Tomorrow, we needed to wake up very early around 5.30, so we could get ready and reached fisherman’s pier by 7 o’clock.
Nite nite.
Wednesday, 23rd February 2011
The rooster in my phone had started the day with cockle doodle dooooo… as usual, I would be the first one to wake up and shower. Everyone was ready before 6.30 and we went to our hotel lobby to put the bag etc. We hit the fisherman’s pier before 7 o’clock.
We saw few people standing on the shore, obviously tourists, with plethora of stuff on the ground, they had boxes of instant noodles and mineral waters. Boxes! We looked at each other and remembered that our bags were full of local chips (like cheetos, taro etc…hehe), we had only around 16 packs of instant noodle, few canned foods, an pathetic strand of vegetable we bought in supermarket yesterday, bakwa, instant soups, coffees, teas and four bottle of mineral water.
We planned to find one two meals in the island, but these tourists seemed very well prepared, that it hurt our confidence a bit. Alright, we were not worried about food, basically more of the water. We need water to cook too.
Put that aside, we walked to the shore and approached a group of local fishermen. With broken language that every parties couldn’t understand each other (we tried English and Indonesian, but they only spoke Tetum) we managed to secure a deal. Autaro? Point point to the sea. Head nodding. How much? Dollar? Berapa? We made hand signal ten as that was the standard rate for fishermen. Nod again. One fisherman made gesture 30, then point to three of us together. I pointed to my watch and they gave me 9 fingers. We made another sign, charade big backpacks and showed them 3 fingers, pointed to three of us and to the boat, ok?
More nods. Smiles. Laughters. Deal.
Everyone would be together in the same boat, we told them we had three heavy backpacks and asked whether the boat could handle the burdens and it was okay.
We would be meeting here, same place, same point, at 9 o’clock, boarding their boat to Autaro Island, cost is USD10 per person.
We were happy; 9 o’clock was just a great timing. We would have time to eat breakfast, brought the car back to car rental, settled everything and came back just in time to board the boat. Sweet. We had a bit of concern that if we couldn’t go Autaro today, we needed to spend another night in Dili, cutting short of Autaro time and finding another way to explore Dili.
Along the way we couldn’t find any place that was open for breakfast, so we drove to Timor lodge car rental. Timor Lodge is a car rental, hotel and restaurant. It should have open early to serve breakfast to its guests and it was. We parked the car and walked inside.
This place has very interesting concept, beside normal hotel, they had container hotels, literally rooms in containers for bakcpackers. Each container was divided into four or five rooms, we were curious to see the inside of the room but didn’t have chance to do so. They also had container toilet outside, each of us had a feel about what’s like to pee in container toilet.
We ordered omelet and banana pancake for breakfast and sat beside swimming pool. The swimming pool also looked like makeshift swimming pool type. While eating, the sky turned dark, my colleague did a bit of anti-rain dancing, it worked for a while, then it started to drip.
8 am, the shop was opened, we went in to settle the rental and damage payment. It took longer that we expected, because we need to wait for the mechanic. I volunteered to run out to buy more water bottles, like what we planned after seeing the over prepared tourist, because I worried we didn’t have enough time later. It was just at the corner of the gate of Timor Lodge that I saw locals selling stuff and water bottles in open grass field. Our friend caught up to accompany me, we bought back four more bottles, it was already drizzling.
Timor Lodge, as promised, sent us back to fisherman’s pier. We reached there on-time at 9 o’clock, however, the rain was getting heavier. The fisherman was already waiting for us, he said we couldn’t sail yet because the wave was rough, caused by the rain, and asked us to put our bags in the boat first, we declined and preferred to hang on the backpacks. We then ran to a shop front across the street. The rain got even heavier and there we were, standing overlooking the rain, chit chatting and having fun. The good mentality for free and easy trip is to just enjoy whatever comes your way.
I think we waited for half to one hour before the rain subsided and put the bag into the boats. We were taking outrigger, skinny boat with two legs, commonly found in Indonesia and Philippine. In Indonesia we call it jukung, for general perhaps it can be explained as outrigger or ‘makeshift catamaran’.
So they put our backpacks underneath the seats, and covered them with cut big black body bags. (body bag, I literally mean body bag in poor man version, same material but slightly thicker than trash bag, no zipper. It’s black plastic sold in meters and rolls. So, for example, when you cut 2 meter of it, you can have a body bag. It shaped like ‘sarong’ or pipe when you have continuous side and openings on both end. Back then, during orientation for my outdoor organization, we were only allowed to bring this as sleeping bag. It’s great though, durable and very resistant to wind. But it rustles when you move and yeah, it’s body bag).
We had predicted that the boat ride was going to be splashy. When I saw there were a few people coming our way, I asked one of the younger fishermen who looked like organizer about how many people in the boat. He spoke Indonesian.
He said seven people, and asked me not to be worried because the boat could take 15-20 people.
our outrigger/jukung/makeshift catamaran Dili - Autaro Island
We drove back, along the way there, there were some restaurants. Our first choice was Blue Ocean, what looked like a simple small restaurant, decorated with blue paint and many sea shells. They had a lot of variety of menus, however, there were only two locals attending to us and none of them understood simple English. They didn’t even understand their own menu when we tried to point what we wanted. We tried a few times with other menu options with same result and finally decided to give up.
There was another place, called Caz Bar, I think it used to be the only restaurant as it was the only one that appeared in Lonely Planet book. (I actually hardly used travel book, only recent trips with my colleague, I peeked and read along the trip. It could be interesting and contains useful info like how to read numbers in foreign languages when we needed to, or some info about places. However, I still find them not always practical and accurate; I’m not the fan of it. On the other hand, it could come in handy for certain situation in remote areas).
When we went in Caz Bar open parking area, we saw a lot of UN cars. Our aim was actually to eat at the next restaurant, a very nice natural looking two storey restaurant.
We walked up there, it was nicely decorated and looked very posh, African theme and we were greeted by a pretty African lady. When we looked at the menu, the price was very high so we excused ourselves and went back to Caz Bar. At that time, we were thinking about the car damage that we needed to pay, credit card was hardly used in here, we only had limited amount of cash, above all, we didn’t want to splurge on expensive food.
Went inside Caz Bar, the restaurant was empty, we requested to be served in the gazebo in front of the beach, after ordering. The price was much cheaper, which was the reasonable prices, but most of their menu was western and Italian. Somehow, three of us wanted to eat Italian food that night. I ordered Spaghetti Bolognese. The other two ordered something I’m not remember., some pasta and some carbonara blablablibli.. We ordered Avocado and Orange Juices too, and one dish for all, a very weird dish called Antichoke someotherblablablibli. None of us knew about this dish before, we basically chose it based on what was inside (Olive and some other vegetables). Our friend is a vegetarian, and two of us didn’t mind something vegetable at all.
When they prepared our order, we played with football machine and had few games with it. My colleague came out as the winner, no price given. It was quite fun to play with that machine although basically the game involved a lot of accidental shot and suicide goal. Since my colleague was the most obnoxious and monkey-like, two of us played against him, yet we still lost. Haha.. We then walked out to the beach and wanted to settle on the gazebo, but it was dark now, the sun had set, there were no lightings and our nemesis, mosquitoes had been spotted around, so we decided to eat at the restaurant.
Our food was quite nice, but the creamy taste was too strong for us that two of us only managed to finish half, despite us being very hungry. We also chose the wrong drink to go with spaghetti, as the avocado juice tasted great but it overwhelmed the overall taste. When the antichoke came, we almost choke; it was arrangement of vegetable that we hardly recognize beside olive. I believe the dish was either came from Germany or French? Nevermind. The vegetables all tasted funny, to our Asian tongue. It’s either sour or something unexplainable, luckily it didn’t choke us. We barely ate quarter of the serving.
We went back to the hotel and packed up our bag again. Same drill. We again, booked for another night, which would be our last night, when we came back from Autaro. We would also keep one bag in the hotel, filled with stuff we wouldn’t need for Autaro. This time we carried one huge backpack, two smaller backpacks and camera bag. They were mostly consisted of cooking equipment, food items, water, shoes, masks, snorkels, some personal belongings. We had packed them waterproof, with a layer of trash bag or plastic bag inside. We also got our poncho on easy to reach location. We were ready!!!
As usual, we had card game, each time we add more invention and made the game more interesting. It was always fun, if we didn’t laugh enough, this trip sure made it up for the whole year of recommended laughing dosage.
Tomorrow, we needed to wake up very early around 5.30, so we could get ready and reached fisherman’s pier by 7 o’clock.
Nite nite.
Wednesday, 23rd February 2011
The rooster in my phone had started the day with cockle doodle dooooo… as usual, I would be the first one to wake up and shower. Everyone was ready before 6.30 and we went to our hotel lobby to put the bag etc. We hit the fisherman’s pier before 7 o’clock.
We saw few people standing on the shore, obviously tourists, with plethora of stuff on the ground, they had boxes of instant noodles and mineral waters. Boxes! We looked at each other and remembered that our bags were full of local chips (like cheetos, taro etc…hehe), we had only around 16 packs of instant noodle, few canned foods, an pathetic strand of vegetable we bought in supermarket yesterday, bakwa, instant soups, coffees, teas and four bottle of mineral water.
We planned to find one two meals in the island, but these tourists seemed very well prepared, that it hurt our confidence a bit. Alright, we were not worried about food, basically more of the water. We need water to cook too.
Put that aside, we walked to the shore and approached a group of local fishermen. With broken language that every parties couldn’t understand each other (we tried English and Indonesian, but they only spoke Tetum) we managed to secure a deal. Autaro? Point point to the sea. Head nodding. How much? Dollar? Berapa? We made hand signal ten as that was the standard rate for fishermen. Nod again. One fisherman made gesture 30, then point to three of us together. I pointed to my watch and they gave me 9 fingers. We made another sign, charade big backpacks and showed them 3 fingers, pointed to three of us and to the boat, ok?
More nods. Smiles. Laughters. Deal.
Everyone would be together in the same boat, we told them we had three heavy backpacks and asked whether the boat could handle the burdens and it was okay.
We would be meeting here, same place, same point, at 9 o’clock, boarding their boat to Autaro Island, cost is USD10 per person.
We were happy; 9 o’clock was just a great timing. We would have time to eat breakfast, brought the car back to car rental, settled everything and came back just in time to board the boat. Sweet. We had a bit of concern that if we couldn’t go Autaro today, we needed to spend another night in Dili, cutting short of Autaro time and finding another way to explore Dili.
Along the way we couldn’t find any place that was open for breakfast, so we drove to Timor lodge car rental. Timor Lodge is a car rental, hotel and restaurant. It should have open early to serve breakfast to its guests and it was. We parked the car and walked inside.
This place has very interesting concept, beside normal hotel, they had container hotels, literally rooms in containers for bakcpackers. Each container was divided into four or five rooms, we were curious to see the inside of the room but didn’t have chance to do so. They also had container toilet outside, each of us had a feel about what’s like to pee in container toilet.
We ordered omelet and banana pancake for breakfast and sat beside swimming pool. The swimming pool also looked like makeshift swimming pool type. While eating, the sky turned dark, my colleague did a bit of anti-rain dancing, it worked for a while, then it started to drip.
8 am, the shop was opened, we went in to settle the rental and damage payment. It took longer that we expected, because we need to wait for the mechanic. I volunteered to run out to buy more water bottles, like what we planned after seeing the over prepared tourist, because I worried we didn’t have enough time later. It was just at the corner of the gate of Timor Lodge that I saw locals selling stuff and water bottles in open grass field. Our friend caught up to accompany me, we bought back four more bottles, it was already drizzling.
Timor Lodge, as promised, sent us back to fisherman’s pier. We reached there on-time at 9 o’clock, however, the rain was getting heavier. The fisherman was already waiting for us, he said we couldn’t sail yet because the wave was rough, caused by the rain, and asked us to put our bags in the boat first, we declined and preferred to hang on the backpacks. We then ran to a shop front across the street. The rain got even heavier and there we were, standing overlooking the rain, chit chatting and having fun. The good mentality for free and easy trip is to just enjoy whatever comes your way.
I think we waited for half to one hour before the rain subsided and put the bag into the boats. We were taking outrigger, skinny boat with two legs, commonly found in Indonesia and Philippine. In Indonesia we call it jukung, for general perhaps it can be explained as outrigger or ‘makeshift catamaran’.
So they put our backpacks underneath the seats, and covered them with cut big black body bags. (body bag, I literally mean body bag in poor man version, same material but slightly thicker than trash bag, no zipper. It’s black plastic sold in meters and rolls. So, for example, when you cut 2 meter of it, you can have a body bag. It shaped like ‘sarong’ or pipe when you have continuous side and openings on both end. Back then, during orientation for my outdoor organization, we were only allowed to bring this as sleeping bag. It’s great though, durable and very resistant to wind. But it rustles when you move and yeah, it’s body bag).
We had predicted that the boat ride was going to be splashy. When I saw there were a few people coming our way, I asked one of the younger fishermen who looked like organizer about how many people in the boat. He spoke Indonesian.
He said seven people, and asked me not to be worried because the boat could take 15-20 people.
our outrigger/jukung/makeshift catamaran Dili - Autaro Island(picture by my colleague)
Ah well, I’m quite sure that 20 people with a lot of luggage would be too much for this size of boat, so at least I should be grateful we had ‘only’ around 8-10 people in total. I knew my colleague’s fear of water, especially with overloaded boats. It is often enough that we read about accident of overcrowding boats, and Indonesia was in that kind of news way too many times.
We took off our slipper and walked the water to board the boat. At first, I was sitting with my colleague, then I moved to the front so each of us took one row.
The sea was calm near the shore; still, I wrapped my camera bag inside the poncho on my lap.
I expected splash anytime so I wouldn’t want to take it out.
When we embarked the sea, we were told to move back two times, now the guys were sitting together and I was in front, my favorite spot. Half of the front boat was empty, I guess so that we could take the wave better.
We watched out for dolphins and whales, eye pinching the horizon to try to get some movements. The weather was cloudy and soon, it started to get splashy.
Just when I was thinking that maybe it’s better for us to don the poncho, a big splash came on the left side and wet my face. Forget it, too late. I just held on to the poncho on my camera bag, gripped it tighter to make sure it waterproof.
Sure enough, the sea was getting rough and water was slapping us literally.
Our friend was sitting on my behind left, and my colleague on my behind right. Everytime I got drenched, on right or left, I saw them using me as shield. Hey…! Huhahaa.. anyway, no one was spared and we were all soaking wet. My colleague who was having fun with his compact at first suddenly found he had nowhere dry to hide his camera, so we desperately pushing his camera into my camera bag inside the poncho.
The sea was getting rougher but outrigger was good because the legs helped a lot in stabilizing the boat. The most was the boat dived head first because of front and back wave movement, I would see it crashing down, pointed front part disappeared a bit into the water followed by the back part, and generous gigantic splash of water face first.
Despite all miseries, I actually enjoyed the ride. My only worried was my camera as the water was really unforgiving, the rest, I had nothing to complain as I love the wild ride. Well, I didn’t plan to get wet during a boat ride, but it’s not everyday experience. We ended up literally wet, much wetter than water rafting, ah well, maybe wetter than snorkeling and scuba diving. It’s possible! For those activities, you don’t find your face dripping with water and soaking wet for almost three hours, somemore not in aquatic attire.
My friends also seemed to kind of enjoying it. At first they didn’t look comfortable, but when they got relaxed, they just took it as it is. We were laughing at each other’s wet faces, pointing at those flying fish darting around the boat and sea gulls circling (there were lot of flying fish, just as my wish to see them again). The boatman and the locals sitting behind us with complete gears, poncho and head wears, might think that we were a bunch of crazy kids.
I mentioned three hours. Yah. I think that was the time we needed for the boat ride. Luckily the weather didn’t get work up along the way because it was quite bad the way it was. Rough surf said it all. We could see the Autaro island from Dili, but it was always so near yet so far. Even when we saw the island up close, we still needed long time to reach, and then we still turned right and travelled the perimeter of the island. When the boat was about to stop, we still haven’t reached, as our staying place was in another part.
If we had braced ourselves for the two-hours-plus wet ride, but enjoyable, this last half an hour was not fun at all. The water was already calm near the shore, the wind was strong, we were wet and I started to shiver and felt very very cold.
Like our friend say, the trip was crazy, we encountered hot Dili, then bloody cold mountain, bloody hot mountain trackback, bloody hot Dili city and Maubara, now we were soaking wet and shivering in the boat. Okay, he was right, but he said it too fast, because we had more interesting journey back from Autaro to Dili. More on that later..
After we finally reached Eco Lodge, the place where we stayed, we happily went off the boat. The fisherman asked for extra 5 bucks and we didn’t mind at all. We quickly don our backpacks and walked to the lodge.
The fence was located less than ten meters away from the sea. We could see few huts, made of thatch roof and bamboo wall.
Eco lodge is an environmental friendly place. Not those bullshitting self acclaimed environmental friendly, but this one really is. Everything is natural, the huts are modest, with natural ventilation and bamboo door and window. There was no electricity, just energy they got from solar panel for simply light at night. One white bulb per hut, nothing more.
The toilets are decomposing toilet, no flushing. We just sprinkled some saw dust after we finished. The shower was old fashioned shower with big cement tub, using scooping method like good old days. The wall of the bathroom was full of beautiful creepers, we could see outside, the wall was low but I didn’t really need to duck. Maybe the guys had too.
shower area
cloth hanger and rubbish bin inside shower
mirror and dressing shelf, green wood is for door locking device
beautiful creeper on the low shower wall
my favorite tile
There was a common area where they had few tables and some pillows, next to the kitchen and barbeque pit. Yah, they had kitchen, water and barbeque pit! To think that we actually brought utensil, stove, solid fuel and water, bottles of water.
But of course, we were happy that we didn’t need to worry about water supply too much. But we were tired, dirty and sticky from the ride and each of us had the urgency to pee after the whole water ride. When I saw the toilet, it was much much better than we had expected. Me and my colleague were arranging for the trip, from the descriptions, I thought we had to shower in very small and low wall shower area under the sky, they mentioned low wall and under the stars in the website (it’s possible, in Thousand Island trip during my uni days long long time ago, the toilet was outdoor with canvas wall and only 1 meter high) and I also thought that there was no toilet or light. So it’s actually much better than that. Anyway, we had lowered our friend expectation a lot so it was also better than what he thought. The taps were running too!
We peed and went to one of the hut. The manager there, Masselo, suggested that we took two huts, since they didn’t expect any other guests. But my colleague insisted that we were bunked together, which I insisted also. The bamboo door could not be locked or even closed properly; the window needed to be kept open for ventilation, few meters in front of us was the beach where everyone had access, and behind was the village. The perimeter fence was just one meter high bamboo fence with many open accesses. It would be pitch dark and scary at night, I would be weary if I slept alone, also, the huts were quite far apart.
Finally, they brought in another bed and put it in between two beds; they also fixed it up with mosquito net. Actually I preferred to be at the window side since it’s be cooler, but the guys suggested that I slept at the wall side so that it’d be safer.
We emptied our back, we had two small racks inside the room to fill our tidbits, the rest we put it in the terrace in front. The terrace had day bed with pillows and one bamboo low table. My camera case was wet, even though it was wrapped with the rain shield and ponco, luckily inside I put my camera in another layer of plastic bag. Everything inside the trashbag in the backpacks was perfectly safe. Anyway, those backpack were protected by another layers of body bags wrapped by the boatman. Our friend’s slingbag he carried with him was also soaking wet, even when he already tried to protect it inside plastic bag.
We took turn to wash up, it was refreshing to shower using scooping mode, and it proved to be very water-efficient.
We went to the common area for some coffee and tea. The place was simple and cosy. They had books and board games. It was nice because we basically had the whole place for ourselves. Masselo had disappeared and most of the time there were only one or two guys who was a security there.
After the break, we decided to walk to the village behind. It was very similar with Derawan village I stayed in another trip to Kalimantan, but simpler. Basically there was only one compacted sand road and few public buildings, the rest were houses, corn plantations, and tree house!
We saw tree house, and it was a nice one.
village road overlooking a chapel
Ah well, I’m quite sure that 20 people with a lot of luggage would be too much for this size of boat, so at least I should be grateful we had ‘only’ around 8-10 people in total. I knew my colleague’s fear of water, especially with overloaded boats. It is often enough that we read about accident of overcrowding boats, and Indonesia was in that kind of news way too many times.
We took off our slipper and walked the water to board the boat. At first, I was sitting with my colleague, then I moved to the front so each of us took one row.
The sea was calm near the shore; still, I wrapped my camera bag inside the poncho on my lap.
I expected splash anytime so I wouldn’t want to take it out.
When we embarked the sea, we were told to move back two times, now the guys were sitting together and I was in front, my favorite spot. Half of the front boat was empty, I guess so that we could take the wave better.
We watched out for dolphins and whales, eye pinching the horizon to try to get some movements. The weather was cloudy and soon, it started to get splashy.
Just when I was thinking that maybe it’s better for us to don the poncho, a big splash came on the left side and wet my face. Forget it, too late. I just held on to the poncho on my camera bag, gripped it tighter to make sure it waterproof.
Sure enough, the sea was getting rough and water was slapping us literally.
Our friend was sitting on my behind left, and my colleague on my behind right. Everytime I got drenched, on right or left, I saw them using me as shield. Hey…! Huhahaa.. anyway, no one was spared and we were all soaking wet. My colleague who was having fun with his compact at first suddenly found he had nowhere dry to hide his camera, so we desperately pushing his camera into my camera bag inside the poncho.
The sea was getting rougher but outrigger was good because the legs helped a lot in stabilizing the boat. The most was the boat dived head first because of front and back wave movement, I would see it crashing down, pointed front part disappeared a bit into the water followed by the back part, and generous gigantic splash of water face first.
Despite all miseries, I actually enjoyed the ride. My only worried was my camera as the water was really unforgiving, the rest, I had nothing to complain as I love the wild ride. Well, I didn’t plan to get wet during a boat ride, but it’s not everyday experience. We ended up literally wet, much wetter than water rafting, ah well, maybe wetter than snorkeling and scuba diving. It’s possible! For those activities, you don’t find your face dripping with water and soaking wet for almost three hours, somemore not in aquatic attire.
My friends also seemed to kind of enjoying it. At first they didn’t look comfortable, but when they got relaxed, they just took it as it is. We were laughing at each other’s wet faces, pointing at those flying fish darting around the boat and sea gulls circling (there were lot of flying fish, just as my wish to see them again). The boatman and the locals sitting behind us with complete gears, poncho and head wears, might think that we were a bunch of crazy kids.
I mentioned three hours. Yah. I think that was the time we needed for the boat ride. Luckily the weather didn’t get work up along the way because it was quite bad the way it was. Rough surf said it all. We could see the Autaro island from Dili, but it was always so near yet so far. Even when we saw the island up close, we still needed long time to reach, and then we still turned right and travelled the perimeter of the island. When the boat was about to stop, we still haven’t reached, as our staying place was in another part.
If we had braced ourselves for the two-hours-plus wet ride, but enjoyable, this last half an hour was not fun at all. The water was already calm near the shore, the wind was strong, we were wet and I started to shiver and felt very very cold.
Like our friend say, the trip was crazy, we encountered hot Dili, then bloody cold mountain, bloody hot mountain trackback, bloody hot Dili city and Maubara, now we were soaking wet and shivering in the boat. Okay, he was right, but he said it too fast, because we had more interesting journey back from Autaro to Dili. More on that later..
After we finally reached Eco Lodge, the place where we stayed, we happily went off the boat. The fisherman asked for extra 5 bucks and we didn’t mind at all. We quickly don our backpacks and walked to the lodge.
The fence was located less than ten meters away from the sea. We could see few huts, made of thatch roof and bamboo wall.
Eco lodge is an environmental friendly place. Not those bullshitting self acclaimed environmental friendly, but this one really is. Everything is natural, the huts are modest, with natural ventilation and bamboo door and window. There was no electricity, just energy they got from solar panel for simply light at night. One white bulb per hut, nothing more.
The toilets are decomposing toilet, no flushing. We just sprinkled some saw dust after we finished. The shower was old fashioned shower with big cement tub, using scooping method like good old days. The wall of the bathroom was full of beautiful creepers, we could see outside, the wall was low but I didn’t really need to duck. Maybe the guys had too.
shower area
cloth hanger and rubbish bin inside shower 
mirror and dressing shelf, green wood is for door locking device
beautiful creeper on the low shower wall
my favorite tileThere was a common area where they had few tables and some pillows, next to the kitchen and barbeque pit. Yah, they had kitchen, water and barbeque pit! To think that we actually brought utensil, stove, solid fuel and water, bottles of water.
But of course, we were happy that we didn’t need to worry about water supply too much. But we were tired, dirty and sticky from the ride and each of us had the urgency to pee after the whole water ride. When I saw the toilet, it was much much better than we had expected. Me and my colleague were arranging for the trip, from the descriptions, I thought we had to shower in very small and low wall shower area under the sky, they mentioned low wall and under the stars in the website (it’s possible, in Thousand Island trip during my uni days long long time ago, the toilet was outdoor with canvas wall and only 1 meter high) and I also thought that there was no toilet or light. So it’s actually much better than that. Anyway, we had lowered our friend expectation a lot so it was also better than what he thought. The taps were running too!
We peed and went to one of the hut. The manager there, Masselo, suggested that we took two huts, since they didn’t expect any other guests. But my colleague insisted that we were bunked together, which I insisted also. The bamboo door could not be locked or even closed properly; the window needed to be kept open for ventilation, few meters in front of us was the beach where everyone had access, and behind was the village. The perimeter fence was just one meter high bamboo fence with many open accesses. It would be pitch dark and scary at night, I would be weary if I slept alone, also, the huts were quite far apart.
Finally, they brought in another bed and put it in between two beds; they also fixed it up with mosquito net. Actually I preferred to be at the window side since it’s be cooler, but the guys suggested that I slept at the wall side so that it’d be safer.
We emptied our back, we had two small racks inside the room to fill our tidbits, the rest we put it in the terrace in front. The terrace had day bed with pillows and one bamboo low table. My camera case was wet, even though it was wrapped with the rain shield and ponco, luckily inside I put my camera in another layer of plastic bag. Everything inside the trashbag in the backpacks was perfectly safe. Anyway, those backpack were protected by another layers of body bags wrapped by the boatman. Our friend’s slingbag he carried with him was also soaking wet, even when he already tried to protect it inside plastic bag.
We took turn to wash up, it was refreshing to shower using scooping mode, and it proved to be very water-efficient.
We went to the common area for some coffee and tea. The place was simple and cosy. They had books and board games. It was nice because we basically had the whole place for ourselves. Masselo had disappeared and most of the time there were only one or two guys who was a security there.
After the break, we decided to walk to the village behind. It was very similar with Derawan village I stayed in another trip to Kalimantan, but simpler. Basically there was only one compacted sand road and few public buildings, the rest were houses, corn plantations, and tree house!
We saw tree house, and it was a nice one.
village road overlooking a chapel(picture by my colleague)
tree house
local children and their dog pets
beach in front of Eco Lodge
The children and the locals were curious to see us, but they were friendly, greeting us with Botarde (pronounced as Bo – Tar – Di) means good afternoon. Their bright white smiles hardly left their faces. We walked to what we thought was the edge, made u turn and stopped at one tiny hidden dark kiosk. With sign languages, we bought 3 eggs (Eggs! We finally found eggs!), coca cola, yes, they have, a pack of candles (item we forgot to bring), lighter (our lighter was spoiled and we only had matches) and a new deck of card because our card was soaking wet in our friend pouch, it was currently being dried in the common area and occupied whole table (nevermind, there was noone else).
Funny thing about East Timor, anywhere you went, regardless how small was the convenient shop, they always sell playing cards.
We walked back to the lodge direction, after took a detour a bit to explore the fields on the hilly side. One of the activity options to do there was trekking, but maybe we had enough trekking for this trip, the humidity caught up and we decided to go back.
On the way, we saw one Caucassian guy wearing some sort of UN uniform or something, he was talking with the locals. When we passed by him, he quickly finished the conversation and caught up with us. Ah well…
From a little bit of chit chatting, he insisted of following us back to the lodge. Basically he was there to do some surveying. But It had become quite uncomfortable because he was self inviting himself and we didn’t have the mood to entertain him. Anyway, we also felt a bit uneasy that he followed us like that. Upon reaching the lodge, Masselo was there again. We just left him there and continued walking to the beach.
The beach was nice but not fantastic. The sand was white but there were not many sea shells. We kicked off our slippers and walked barefoot.
We soon forgot about the inconvenience and enjoying the stroll, sitting under the tree etc.
After walking the right side of the beach and reached the mangrove area, we walked back to the left, passing by our lodge and had to cancel our intention to go back because the guy was still around. Worse, not only one, but there were another two army-clad uniform Caucasians joining and they were talking to Masselo and the security guy.
We got quite irritated and hoped that we didn’t bring any trouble by letting that guy followed us, but self invited was inevitable.
Upon seeing them, we just walked straight to the right side of the beach. Further down, we were trying to make a sand castle. It was not easy making sand castle with hands, tell you. I ended up making a pig, my colleague making a very ugly-not convincing-looking sand castle. I tried to make a lump of shit, he helped me and also made turtle and then what looked like a flatten crocodile. Our friend just shook his head and watched us. He commented that at least this time there was me who wanted to play with my colleague. They were recalling their Japan trip two months back, when my colleague complained that he played and tried to make snowman alone because the friend just stood there to watch and didn’t bother to help. The friend said my colleague took a long time yet only make two balls stacked together, no hands, hat or anything that resembled a snowman.
Mahahaha,… I was cracking up. Both of them were travel buddy, it’s funny because they were so different yet they got along very well. I just got to know this friend much better during this trip. He is a proper, a serious type but playful at the same time (yah, it’s not easy to understand what I mean), he doesn’t bother to play with those things; sand, snow, running wild, burning stuff, climb tree, climb rock but he enjoyed watching and just let my colleague go crazy. But sometimes he could turn into very crazy too when he gets into something, like during our card games and canoeing the day after this.
My colleague is very playful especially outside work, he never stay still during holidays and upon seeing beautiful nature. He can always think of fun things to do and make dull things fun too. I think I’m leaning to my colleague’s characteristic, that’s why we get along well, but of course, I am not as crazy as him. Of course! The self analysis was supported (or maybe not really supported) by this friend who said I might be somewhere in between their characters, they actually meant, I have both their crazyness. Well that doesn’t sound anywhere near a compliment rite… haha…
After all the horrendous looking creatures we made from the sand, we dug fire pit for tonight bonfire. The other things I shared with this colleague, we love burning things. Well, we burned our socks accidentally and almost burned our shoes when we were climbing Rinjani. We cleared up the whole rubbish around our perimeter there and also in Mount Ramelau by burning them. So fire pit was a must. Anyway, I brought 48 pieces of solid fuel and we only used four in the mountain.
We dug the firepit, together with the drain around it. The tide changed fast, we had to race digging the drain with the waves bringing in lots of seawater, trying to drown our firepit. I think we must had looked like hamster digging frantically and our friends laughed like mad at us.
When the firepit was done, protected with bloody long drain, we walked back to the lodge and luckily only Masselo was around. We were relieved when he told us that everything was okay.
We sat around the common area playing card when I had my first nature call. Time to try the decomposing toilet. Amazingly, this toilet didn’t smell, the partial wall before the roof helped the circulation as well. I don’t want to go into too much detail of this toilet, but I’ll attach the picture of how it works. Anyway, I couldn’t really see anything down the toilet because it was dark. Safe to say, I didn’t try too hard. My colleague however was curious enough to peek and generously shared the details with us, but nothing too horrible, he just saw some crab crawling etc. We didn’t plan to cook some crabs so it was fine.
how it works!
the toilet with mud wall and bamboo door
toilet and pot of saw-dust for 'flushing'
tree house
local children and their dog pets
beach in front of Eco Lodge
The children and the locals were curious to see us, but they were friendly, greeting us with Botarde (pronounced as Bo – Tar – Di) means good afternoon. Their bright white smiles hardly left their faces. We walked to what we thought was the edge, made u turn and stopped at one tiny hidden dark kiosk. With sign languages, we bought 3 eggs (Eggs! We finally found eggs!), coca cola, yes, they have, a pack of candles (item we forgot to bring), lighter (our lighter was spoiled and we only had matches) and a new deck of card because our card was soaking wet in our friend pouch, it was currently being dried in the common area and occupied whole table (nevermind, there was noone else).
Funny thing about East Timor, anywhere you went, regardless how small was the convenient shop, they always sell playing cards.
We walked back to the lodge direction, after took a detour a bit to explore the fields on the hilly side. One of the activity options to do there was trekking, but maybe we had enough trekking for this trip, the humidity caught up and we decided to go back.
On the way, we saw one Caucassian guy wearing some sort of UN uniform or something, he was talking with the locals. When we passed by him, he quickly finished the conversation and caught up with us. Ah well…
From a little bit of chit chatting, he insisted of following us back to the lodge. Basically he was there to do some surveying. But It had become quite uncomfortable because he was self inviting himself and we didn’t have the mood to entertain him. Anyway, we also felt a bit uneasy that he followed us like that. Upon reaching the lodge, Masselo was there again. We just left him there and continued walking to the beach.
The beach was nice but not fantastic. The sand was white but there were not many sea shells. We kicked off our slippers and walked barefoot.
We soon forgot about the inconvenience and enjoying the stroll, sitting under the tree etc.
After walking the right side of the beach and reached the mangrove area, we walked back to the left, passing by our lodge and had to cancel our intention to go back because the guy was still around. Worse, not only one, but there were another two army-clad uniform Caucasians joining and they were talking to Masselo and the security guy.
We got quite irritated and hoped that we didn’t bring any trouble by letting that guy followed us, but self invited was inevitable.
Upon seeing them, we just walked straight to the right side of the beach. Further down, we were trying to make a sand castle. It was not easy making sand castle with hands, tell you. I ended up making a pig, my colleague making a very ugly-not convincing-looking sand castle. I tried to make a lump of shit, he helped me and also made turtle and then what looked like a flatten crocodile. Our friend just shook his head and watched us. He commented that at least this time there was me who wanted to play with my colleague. They were recalling their Japan trip two months back, when my colleague complained that he played and tried to make snowman alone because the friend just stood there to watch and didn’t bother to help. The friend said my colleague took a long time yet only make two balls stacked together, no hands, hat or anything that resembled a snowman.
Mahahaha,… I was cracking up. Both of them were travel buddy, it’s funny because they were so different yet they got along very well. I just got to know this friend much better during this trip. He is a proper, a serious type but playful at the same time (yah, it’s not easy to understand what I mean), he doesn’t bother to play with those things; sand, snow, running wild, burning stuff, climb tree, climb rock but he enjoyed watching and just let my colleague go crazy. But sometimes he could turn into very crazy too when he gets into something, like during our card games and canoeing the day after this.
My colleague is very playful especially outside work, he never stay still during holidays and upon seeing beautiful nature. He can always think of fun things to do and make dull things fun too. I think I’m leaning to my colleague’s characteristic, that’s why we get along well, but of course, I am not as crazy as him. Of course! The self analysis was supported (or maybe not really supported) by this friend who said I might be somewhere in between their characters, they actually meant, I have both their crazyness. Well that doesn’t sound anywhere near a compliment rite… haha…
After all the horrendous looking creatures we made from the sand, we dug fire pit for tonight bonfire. The other things I shared with this colleague, we love burning things. Well, we burned our socks accidentally and almost burned our shoes when we were climbing Rinjani. We cleared up the whole rubbish around our perimeter there and also in Mount Ramelau by burning them. So fire pit was a must. Anyway, I brought 48 pieces of solid fuel and we only used four in the mountain.
We dug the firepit, together with the drain around it. The tide changed fast, we had to race digging the drain with the waves bringing in lots of seawater, trying to drown our firepit. I think we must had looked like hamster digging frantically and our friends laughed like mad at us.
When the firepit was done, protected with bloody long drain, we walked back to the lodge and luckily only Masselo was around. We were relieved when he told us that everything was okay.
We sat around the common area playing card when I had my first nature call. Time to try the decomposing toilet. Amazingly, this toilet didn’t smell, the partial wall before the roof helped the circulation as well. I don’t want to go into too much detail of this toilet, but I’ll attach the picture of how it works. Anyway, I couldn’t really see anything down the toilet because it was dark. Safe to say, I didn’t try too hard. My colleague however was curious enough to peek and generously shared the details with us, but nothing too horrible, he just saw some crab crawling etc. We didn’t plan to cook some crabs so it was fine.
how it works!
the toilet with mud wall and bamboo door
toilet and pot of saw-dust for 'flushing'Speaking of which, I heard him laughing so loud even from the toilet that was located at probably 30 meters away. Apparently our friend was picking the vegetable for our dinner; it made him look like a very decent auntie coming from a market.
Overall we had 16 packs of instant noodle, 2 cans of luncheon meat, one strand of vegetable (that survived the sea and me, the clumsy carrier!), bakwa, few cans of peanut and baked bean, corn kennel, packed soups, peanut butter and bread for main foods. The rest we had a lot of chips, lotus seed, marshmallow, snicker bars, kit kat etc.
some of our logistic(picture by my colleague)
the strand of vegetable (not easy to find!) that survived the sea and me!(picture by my colleague)
peanut butter sandwich, yeah, the bread used to be square..
peanut butter sandwich, yeah, the bread used to be square..(picture by my colleague)
one of our more comprehensive menu
more standard menu
one of our more comprehensive menu
more standard menuTonight we cooked 5 packs of instant noodle, fried half can of luncheon meat and bakwa.
We decided to start cooking. It was nice travelling with these two because they are good in cooking, I won’t speak beyond instant noodle at this moment but yes, they were taking control of the kitchen. Since we saw rats, lizards and cockroaches around here and there, we washed every utensil before using them. There was an open washing area with simple rubbish sorting system. The common area was connected by a ‘bridge’ to the kitchen where we went back and forth sending food. One guy cooked the instant noodle; the other fried the luncheon meat. How good was that! Never disturb guys at work, and I fully agreed. He he he… but of course I did my part helping to prepare everything and setting up the table. After meals there were always two of us washing dishes, the other cleaned the kitchen. It’s functional group because no one was shaking legs.
It was a very nice first meal. Especially the whole place was belong to us. We laid out everything nicely like proper dinner, prepared some tea and coffee, and of course and always, many mosquito coils around us.
the common area
the three tables; one for board game, one for card game, one for dining, all ours!
the dining table, closest to the kitchen (another hut behind) and pantry (picture below)
pantry area and library cupboard full of books and board games, the table with sea shell was the table for tea :) .. we hardly used this one though If you don’t mind basic place, but relaxing and peaceful, do come to Autaro when we could go back to good old kampong feeling days. We agreed it’s a nice hideout in case you are too sick of the world, but be prepared to battle the sea.
After dinner, when the sky started to turn dark, we went to the beach. Gathered some fire woods and dug up a brand new fire pit on the beach in front of the lodge. The first one we dug still surviving, but a bit too far.
We took out our solid fuels and started burning. One thing I noticed, if me and my colleague are kind of heck care about proper things, like for example if there is a dry place, we would sit, if it’s wet, we would stand or squat, those kind of thing. This friend is a bit more proper and always try to make the best of situation, make things better and more comfortable, and I appreciate that!
During bonfire time for example, he would took out the ground sheet, prepared the tidbits. After bonfire in the room or terrace he would lit up candles in the recycled food cans for what we called ‘ambience’ (with over-the-top French accent), prepared plethora of mosquito coils etc. Maybe I have to correct this a bit, I think my colleague is also a better care taker than me, perhaps learning from this friend. They would prepare flask of hot water that we kidnapped from kitchen for us to make hot soup, coffee or tea at night. It was contagious and soon I learned from them and it had become our ritual to make everything much more pleasant, especially in the island. Since we were here to enjoy the beach holiday, not to rugged it up. Especially like bonfire time when all of us had washed up, we always tried to bath early before it got dark as we could only use flood light to see.
Anyway, we sat around the bonfire to enjoy the pitch dark private beach, all for ourselves. Too bad, it was cloudy almost all the time, if not, it would be a great place to see the stars. But, more often than not, the ground sheet was not really useful this time. We always needed to move around because the wind always changed direction and we ended up being smoked. We had teary eyes, cough fit but having fun. It was the first time I roasted marshmallow on the fire. I didn’t actually know marshmallow can be dipped into hot chocolate and never tried roasting it in the fire. It was not a common thing back in the days of my childhood or uni time. So both of them taught me how to do it. The marshmallow would become bloated, a little bit of crispy burn but soft and warm on the inside. If it hadn’t been too sweet, it’s very nice.
We hung around the fire for some time, gathered small pieces of wood around us. We saw some torch lights from far once in a while. One or two fishermen went out to the sea to catch crab or squid I suppose, one or two villagers walked pass, probably also wondering what we were doing. But it was seldom and there was no much disruption to our peaceful beach.
We enjoyed the time a bit more before decided to turn off the fire by dumping sands and went back to the room.
The whole lodge area was dark, with only light came from our room. Even the security guy was sitting in the dark. There was a light bulb in the toilet though, and they put a floodlight inside the shower. The rest, all dark.
All of us decided it would be nice to have another quick bath. So we took turn waiting on each other, the security told us we could actually used another shower at the other side. But the two guys declined, and we just waited for one another, chit chatting or toileting.
I met my nemesis, lizard in the toilet, and nemesis of my collague, flying cockroach. Everything was fair game, I saw our friend who afraid of height went up the mountain, my colleague who not comfortable in the water went to rough boat ride, so I have to face my fear too and so I stuck my tongue to those lizards. Bite me. Eh., maybe that is not the right phrase.
After the fresh re-shower, we went to the room and start playing cards. The light attracted a lot of moths, some insects and spiders. We didn’t really care for other insects…, but mosquitoes!!!
We already lighted up five to six mosquito coils, we even felt a little bit giddy because of the smoke, yet there were still many of them around. Mosquito hunts began again, but it was not as effective as the previous hotel because it was a bit dark and they disguised quite well in the bamboo. We played cards while hacking mosquitoes and played insider joke with the pink makeshift mosquito net for the middle bed.
I woke up a few times that night being bitten by mosquitoes and also felt warm. I managed to locate the mosquito repellent in the dark, and had a better sleep after that, especially when the wind picked up and providing pleasant breeze.
Thursday, 24th February 2011
Yesterday, my colleague managed to make a deal with a fisherman that we were going to rent his canoe for a day. It was a tiny version of makeshift catamaran. So early in the morning, the fisherman who couldn’t speak a word of English or Indonesian, came to deliver two paddles.
We already woke up, showered and started to prepare breakfast. This morning we were having peanut butter sandwich. Three of us were scattered around. I was preparing the sandwiches, one was in the shower, the one was tidying up our terrace and then we circled the task to make coffee and tea or preparing the things we wanted to bring. Mask, snorkel, tidbits and also two beach balls I brought for the local kids. Too bad there were no suitable pump head even though one of the local guy in the lodge had the tire pump and various pump heads. We told him it was okay, but he was very nice and handed us a nice leather football. He thought we wanted to play the ball.
After breakfast, three of us running out to the beach and boarded the canoe. We started to paddle happily. Let’s go to the other side of the island! Let’s see what other lodge look like! Let’s find the coral and snorkel! Let’s! Let’s! We were very energetic and both guys started to paddle, since we only had two paddles.
After ten minutes of paddling, we realized something was not really right. We hardly moved. First of all, we needed to get a good grasp with how to handle the boat. We know a thing or two about boat, turn left, paddle right or backpaddle left. We still made lousy progress though, ha ha.
I put in my mask and dip my head into the water, we were trying to locate nice coral we could swim and snorkeling in, hopefully we could see dugong. It’s not impossible, Autaro Island had been known for the encounter of dugongs. Too bad, we were not sure which part of island they belong, and there were no one to ask. And it’s huge island. And we would never explore enough of it, because half an hour later, we were still very close to...where we started.
Nevermind, three of us were high spirited, dragging our boat to the shore, and played in the water. There were a lot of starfish and small fish in between seaweed and sea grass. Swimming around, playing with starfish, relaxing, chit chatting, running around the shore, we were basically looked like three kampong kids, our skins were very tan and dark already on that day. That helped make our case.
ground creeper on the sand in front of the lodge
our fire pit
our lonely canoe
beautiful beautiful grassland beside the shore(picture by my colleague)
We saw a red cylindrical wind flag a distance away and made it our next destination to reach. After loading our tidbits back in the boat, we pushed the boat a little bit to free it from the sand, and off we went, trying to paddle clumsily to the direction of the flag. We saw some locals along the beach; including the fisherman who rented the boat to us, he asked us whether we needed help in paddling and would be happy to let his boy followed us in the boat. We communicated in broken language, we told him there was no need for it, we were just having fun getting lost and moving in unclear direction and had really good laugh about it. Anyway, it’s more fun to be on our own. We tried to ask him where we could find nice coral but he didn’t really understand what we were asking. I gave it up because I worried that he might misunderstand me of looking for corals as souvenirs. Anyway, we supposed the corals and dive sites are a bit further from the shore, so we just back to our original direction to reach the flag.
We paddling again, laughing happily, we were still quite a distance from the flag when we realized how hungry we were. Let’s go back…! Haha..
So near yet so far, with the flag right in front of our eyes, we made a very big U-turn because of big wind and lousy captains, including me who took turn paddling too. And one point it was easier to just let my colleague paddle alone, while me and our friend just sat or jumped into the water and directed the boat, or half pushing the boat. When we tried to climb back in, the boat started to lift up to our direction, the other leg had already been out of the water 45 degree. Because the water was too deep, we need to really grab the boat and used our hand to drag the whole body weight in without the support of kicking force from the legs We were screaming and laughing and quickly let go before it turned upside down. We took turn, our friend managed to climb back in, when it was my turn, the boat toppled again, talk about hurting my confidence!! Now I felt like I was the heaviest of all! We were having fun laughing at me. Instead of risking another humiliation, I decided to just swim back to the beach. Again, we dragged the boat to the beach, and run to the lodge. We rinsed ourselves with freshwater and went to do some cooking. Same menu, this time we had something special, the eggs!
Playing with water made us very hungry, again, it was nice cosy afternoon on our own. After meal, we lazed for a while before deciding to just take a walk on the beach.
Prepared with our stuff, drink water, tidbits, mask, snorkel, we walked out again barefooted to the our destination, red flag, meeting some local kids along the day. Friendly greeting as usual, botardeee… Our friend was very energetic and high spirited today, he cheerfully greeted the local, although it was quite a messed-up effort, something like bolitar…or bonardeee…
The sky looked cloudy and the wind was very strong. We stopped once in a while, collecting seashell, dipped into water, drew something on the sand.
Again, when we were about to reach the flag, the rain was pouring down in a sudden. “Run!” my colleague shouted, made U-turn and pointed, ”To that tree!”
I tell you, none of us registered what did we do, we just did it First, we were already soaking wet on the first place, as if the rain would make it worse. Second, we made U-turn again instead of fulfilling our goal to get closer to the flag, that was soooo near. Third, there were one thousand and one trees, all same height, noone stood out. So there was actually not a legitimate reason to follow him, but yet two of us understood what he meant. Just like kebakaran jenggot (uh..how to translate this., kebakaran jenggot is burning beard, a phrase in Indonesian language that means panicking act in result of something that happen suddenly, just like when you burned your beard and need to do something really fast about it), we ran like hell into the unidentified tree, and there, three of us stood there, looking at each other and grinning.
When I asked up about why we ran like mad to find shelter while we were already wet (the tree barely provide any shelter by the way), my colleague said because he felt cold since they were both shirtless. Okay.. fair point…ha..
After a while, I felt the need to go toilet and off I went to the ocean, we then continued the walk under the mild rain, and it was a miracle!! We reached the red flag! Mahaha…
We walked away further until the end of the island that we could see, there were still long coast behind big rock, but we made the U-turn since all the thundering storm from the sky was screaming.
We couldn’t even finish one quarter of the big marshmallow bag, so on our way back, we found some small groups of children playing in the water or in their huts further on the shore, we would distribute the marshmallow and other tidbits that we had. Our friend patiently distributing the food, while we were the guinea pigs to show the children that the marshmallow could be eaten, by eating them of course.
The kids were giggling happily to get their snack, and probably for the reason that there were three crazy sun-burnt mute foreigners who ran around the beach for whatever reasons and doing useless funny stuffs.
We walked back, our mood was always great and we actually had a soundtrack for our island adventure, because my colleague had poisoned our brain when he kept repeating the same song that at the end of the day, it kind of stuck in our head.
It started from row, row a boat, na na na na na (We didn’t really know the lyrics)
Then became,
Doe, a deer, a female deer,
Ray, a drop of golden sun,
Me, a name I call myself,
Far, a long long way to run…
Sew, a neddle pulling thread,
La, a note to follow sew…
Tea, a drink with jam and bread,
And we will be back to DO!!
You know those kind of annoying radio songs that keep repeating and you end up couldn’t get it off your head (Damn Umbrella, Rihanna!), yah, it started like that, but then, it suited our mood really well, then we turned to sing along happily for almost the whole trip. When we were in the city, there were noises and sounds, so it was not so prominent, but on the island, we only heard ourselves, so it has become an almost every minute song.
Yah, we were at the stage of not feeling shy singing out loud with each other.
Back to the lodge, the two of them laughed at me of how dark I became. Not only dark, it was explainable, but I sort of had inverted raccoon face. On my diving holidays, I was almost always inverted raccoon because I wore mask therefore the white patches around my eyes. But here, I didn’t wear google, only wore mask few minutes, only underwater, my face from side view is actually flat (not the deep eye type) but the circle around my eyes and my hairline around the forehead remained fair, while the rest were totally burnt. Imagine how ugly it is, It was damn ugly!!
We each took long relaxing shower, and decided to walk to the village again. Surrounded by corn field, we had the craving of having grilled corn on the bonfire tonite. We also entertained the idea of having baked sweet potato using bonfire. How good it would be!
Drooling, we started to walk. Anyway, we wanted to find the mysterious market, today is Thursday, according to the guy we met at the pier in Dili, there are market on Thursday and Friday.
Anyway, we couldn’t find the market, we couldn’t find corn! Yah, corn field was literally everywhere but no one was selling them (because everybody has it?), we couldn’t find sweet potato also.
Today, the village looked livelier than yesterday; they probably had some event going on. On one part of the path, the situation was quite rowdy, full of teenagers and we attracted a lot of attention. But everything was okay. One more thing, the dogs there were all unfriendly. They always barked at us or try to ambush just to startle us. Tsk..tsk..bad dogs..haha..
Anyway, disappointed, we made our way back to the lodge; we decided to steal one corn we could reach from the lodge. Our lodge was surrounded by corn plantation. It was twenty cm long corn, but when we peeled, there was only a baby corn inside. Mahahaha…I guess we had to stick with noodle, bakwa, beans, luncheon meat and soup again tonight. Actually, surprisingly, none of us mind with that menu. In fact, we were very okay with that, when we returned to the city, you would still see us ordering noodle for meals.
I went around at the lodge taking picture as tomorrow we would leave the island early in the morning. Masselo had told us there was a fisherman boat leaving around 7 am, previously he said there was only one boat leaving at 3 am. I wouldn’t fancy taking 3 am boat, it would be dark, sleepy and dangerous.
one of the two-stories hut, below is the terrace, above is the room
We saw a red cylindrical wind flag a distance away and made it our next destination to reach. After loading our tidbits back in the boat, we pushed the boat a little bit to free it from the sand, and off we went, trying to paddle clumsily to the direction of the flag. We saw some locals along the beach; including the fisherman who rented the boat to us, he asked us whether we needed help in paddling and would be happy to let his boy followed us in the boat. We communicated in broken language, we told him there was no need for it, we were just having fun getting lost and moving in unclear direction and had really good laugh about it. Anyway, it’s more fun to be on our own. We tried to ask him where we could find nice coral but he didn’t really understand what we were asking. I gave it up because I worried that he might misunderstand me of looking for corals as souvenirs. Anyway, we supposed the corals and dive sites are a bit further from the shore, so we just back to our original direction to reach the flag.
We paddling again, laughing happily, we were still quite a distance from the flag when we realized how hungry we were. Let’s go back…! Haha..
So near yet so far, with the flag right in front of our eyes, we made a very big U-turn because of big wind and lousy captains, including me who took turn paddling too. And one point it was easier to just let my colleague paddle alone, while me and our friend just sat or jumped into the water and directed the boat, or half pushing the boat. When we tried to climb back in, the boat started to lift up to our direction, the other leg had already been out of the water 45 degree. Because the water was too deep, we need to really grab the boat and used our hand to drag the whole body weight in without the support of kicking force from the legs We were screaming and laughing and quickly let go before it turned upside down. We took turn, our friend managed to climb back in, when it was my turn, the boat toppled again, talk about hurting my confidence!! Now I felt like I was the heaviest of all! We were having fun laughing at me. Instead of risking another humiliation, I decided to just swim back to the beach. Again, we dragged the boat to the beach, and run to the lodge. We rinsed ourselves with freshwater and went to do some cooking. Same menu, this time we had something special, the eggs!
Playing with water made us very hungry, again, it was nice cosy afternoon on our own. After meal, we lazed for a while before deciding to just take a walk on the beach.
Prepared with our stuff, drink water, tidbits, mask, snorkel, we walked out again barefooted to the our destination, red flag, meeting some local kids along the day. Friendly greeting as usual, botardeee… Our friend was very energetic and high spirited today, he cheerfully greeted the local, although it was quite a messed-up effort, something like bolitar…or bonardeee…
The sky looked cloudy and the wind was very strong. We stopped once in a while, collecting seashell, dipped into water, drew something on the sand.
Again, when we were about to reach the flag, the rain was pouring down in a sudden. “Run!” my colleague shouted, made U-turn and pointed, ”To that tree!”
I tell you, none of us registered what did we do, we just did it First, we were already soaking wet on the first place, as if the rain would make it worse. Second, we made U-turn again instead of fulfilling our goal to get closer to the flag, that was soooo near. Third, there were one thousand and one trees, all same height, noone stood out. So there was actually not a legitimate reason to follow him, but yet two of us understood what he meant. Just like kebakaran jenggot (uh..how to translate this., kebakaran jenggot is burning beard, a phrase in Indonesian language that means panicking act in result of something that happen suddenly, just like when you burned your beard and need to do something really fast about it), we ran like hell into the unidentified tree, and there, three of us stood there, looking at each other and grinning.
When I asked up about why we ran like mad to find shelter while we were already wet (the tree barely provide any shelter by the way), my colleague said because he felt cold since they were both shirtless. Okay.. fair point…ha..
After a while, I felt the need to go toilet and off I went to the ocean, we then continued the walk under the mild rain, and it was a miracle!! We reached the red flag! Mahaha…
We walked away further until the end of the island that we could see, there were still long coast behind big rock, but we made the U-turn since all the thundering storm from the sky was screaming.
We couldn’t even finish one quarter of the big marshmallow bag, so on our way back, we found some small groups of children playing in the water or in their huts further on the shore, we would distribute the marshmallow and other tidbits that we had. Our friend patiently distributing the food, while we were the guinea pigs to show the children that the marshmallow could be eaten, by eating them of course.
The kids were giggling happily to get their snack, and probably for the reason that there were three crazy sun-burnt mute foreigners who ran around the beach for whatever reasons and doing useless funny stuffs.
We walked back, our mood was always great and we actually had a soundtrack for our island adventure, because my colleague had poisoned our brain when he kept repeating the same song that at the end of the day, it kind of stuck in our head.
It started from row, row a boat, na na na na na (We didn’t really know the lyrics)
Then became,
Doe, a deer, a female deer,
Ray, a drop of golden sun,
Me, a name I call myself,
Far, a long long way to run…
Sew, a neddle pulling thread,
La, a note to follow sew…
Tea, a drink with jam and bread,
And we will be back to DO!!
You know those kind of annoying radio songs that keep repeating and you end up couldn’t get it off your head (Damn Umbrella, Rihanna!), yah, it started like that, but then, it suited our mood really well, then we turned to sing along happily for almost the whole trip. When we were in the city, there were noises and sounds, so it was not so prominent, but on the island, we only heard ourselves, so it has become an almost every minute song.
Yah, we were at the stage of not feeling shy singing out loud with each other.
Back to the lodge, the two of them laughed at me of how dark I became. Not only dark, it was explainable, but I sort of had inverted raccoon face. On my diving holidays, I was almost always inverted raccoon because I wore mask therefore the white patches around my eyes. But here, I didn’t wear google, only wore mask few minutes, only underwater, my face from side view is actually flat (not the deep eye type) but the circle around my eyes and my hairline around the forehead remained fair, while the rest were totally burnt. Imagine how ugly it is, It was damn ugly!!
We each took long relaxing shower, and decided to walk to the village again. Surrounded by corn field, we had the craving of having grilled corn on the bonfire tonite. We also entertained the idea of having baked sweet potato using bonfire. How good it would be!
Drooling, we started to walk. Anyway, we wanted to find the mysterious market, today is Thursday, according to the guy we met at the pier in Dili, there are market on Thursday and Friday.
Anyway, we couldn’t find the market, we couldn’t find corn! Yah, corn field was literally everywhere but no one was selling them (because everybody has it?), we couldn’t find sweet potato also.
Today, the village looked livelier than yesterday; they probably had some event going on. On one part of the path, the situation was quite rowdy, full of teenagers and we attracted a lot of attention. But everything was okay. One more thing, the dogs there were all unfriendly. They always barked at us or try to ambush just to startle us. Tsk..tsk..bad dogs..haha..
Anyway, disappointed, we made our way back to the lodge; we decided to steal one corn we could reach from the lodge. Our lodge was surrounded by corn plantation. It was twenty cm long corn, but when we peeled, there was only a baby corn inside. Mahahaha…I guess we had to stick with noodle, bakwa, beans, luncheon meat and soup again tonight. Actually, surprisingly, none of us mind with that menu. In fact, we were very okay with that, when we returned to the city, you would still see us ordering noodle for meals.
I went around at the lodge taking picture as tomorrow we would leave the island early in the morning. Masselo had told us there was a fisherman boat leaving around 7 am, previously he said there was only one boat leaving at 3 am. I wouldn’t fancy taking 3 am boat, it would be dark, sleepy and dangerous.
one of the two-stories hut, below is the terrace, above is the room
terrace on first storey
rear view of one storey hut
one storey hut with terrace in front
side view of one storey hut, typical with ours but I'd just show this one because our was full of laundry, mess, etc etc...
for example, this was the condition of our table at the terrace..(picture by my colleague)
the shower and toilet area
just a gazebo
barbeque hut
the shower and toilet area
just a gazebo
barbeque hut
mosquito nets inside the room
recycle...!(picture by my colleague)
Flash back for a while, long time ago in uni I took night boat, significantly bigger and higher boat than those fisherman’s boat, equipped with inside cabin etc. It was dark and quite late at night when we started the journey. In the middle, the sea got so rough that water started pouring in from the front. I was sitting on the front deck with one of my friends while the rest were inside the cabin. The sea got so rough, soon half of the front deck was filled with water, and one by one, my other friends all went out to the boat side to empty their stomach. Eventhough I’m prone to seasickness, I actually do very well if I stay in opened area without the smell of the engine. So I was fine in the beginning but looking at everyone, I finally needed to go to the boat edge also, including the friend who was sitting with me, although he was able to hold it longer. So, I think taking small boat in the night or dawn was not a good idea.
So we were happy to get the seven o’clock boat, of course! We didn’t need to wake up dreadfully early too.
That afternoon we also arranged with Masselo for our payment. It cost us US$15 per night per person to stay there, and US$5 for using the kitchen. Overall, we needed to pay 95 bucks. The challenge was to find the change for the money; it probably went around the village to get the change.
It was getting dark and we were preparing the epic bonfire!! This time, we collected a lot of firewood around the beach, we still have the nicely built firepit yesterday. With slight touch up, it’s good to go. Oh ya, I forgot to mention that we got company that afternoon. There was a group of people staying in the lodge too. We didn’t know how many of them, perhaps three man and two women. They had their own speedboat, but whole day long they just went around the island. We passed them, eh, they passed by us many time during our canoeing adventure. Maybe they were looking for a place to stay, before dark, they dropped in the lodge and stayed in two huts some distances from us.
We started to bring out our stuffs. Me and my colleague lighted up the fire, we had so many excess solid fuel to burn! Since it was raining a lot in the day, the woods were damp or wet, so we really needed those solid fuel. We managed to have very good bonfire going on, and this time, we wanted to roast the bakwa, while enjoying tea and coffee and listening to the wave, although too bad, it was starless again. It’s wonderful to be able to enjoy the time, outdoor, with good friends. It kind of bring back good old days, when bunch of friends sitting together in bonfire, either in freezing cold mountain or playing guitar on the beach during weekend event or gathering.
The fun didn’t last long, as suddenly, it was raining again. We were still squatting around for awhile, but at the end we had to run back to the room. We ended up hung around the terrace and in the room with nice candlelight ‘ambience’, drinking hot soup and playing cards, all the while keeping our eyes to the fire.
As a prove that we had solid bonfire, the fire lasted more than half an hour under the rain. We still hopeful that we could continue the bonfire, but the rain never subside.
We played card + mosquito hunt again. Tonight I was not going to give any mosquito a chance to bite me, after the suffering previous night. Our friend actually light up mosquito coils to put on our bed inside the mosquito nets, so it could smoke out every insect that attempt to ambush us later when we got ready to sleep. I also used the mosquito repellent more extensively, ex-ten-sive-ly. Our friend commented that both of us were his ideal traveling companion because we took away most of the mosquito’s attention from him, three of us are mosquito prone, but me and my colleague are the worst.
As predicted, our new neighbor played some music with crackling battery powered radio. Luckily, it was not significant to destroy the peace, if there was, drowned with our laughters.
The night was quite good, I slept well, not as many mosquitoes tried to bother me, the wind was pleasant, but my colleague was restless. I heard him waking up many times. When I asked, he said he was suspicious there were something outside, we did some investigation but all we could see was pitch dark surrounding accompanied by the sound of wave. I woke up few times finding him standing in front of our food rack looking for something with torch, he said he suspected there was a rat trying to steal our food. Good travel companion.. he was croakroach fighter in my previous trip, this trip he was mosquito batman and rat hunter. Mahaha…
Friday, 25th February 2011
Around five o’clock, I couldn’t sleep already, anyway, my goal on our last morning was to take picture of sunrise. So quietly I grabbed the camera and sneaked out. It was still dark outside, but further in the horizon I could see the cyan sky. I went out to the beach, to sit down enjoying the cool breeze, surrounding and taking pictures. There was a fisherman middling with his boat further away, I suspect that would be out boat for later.
Not more than ten minutes I was out, my colleague was already behind me, taking pictures too. The sky started to turn orange but there was no sunrise for the cloudy weather. Our friend was also waked up and we heard him packing.
I had basically packed most of my stuff and we had finished most of our food supply, except chocolates. Both of us went back to pack the rest of everything, especially laundry that we left outside on the railing. Learning from the boat ride, we waterproof everything, I put three layer of plastic for my camera. I showered for the last time, I think we also drank some soup before proceed to the shore.
The boat that I saw was indeed the boat for us, and a bunch of locals, and a goat. When we saw the boat, straightaway we had concern. It’s not an outrigger, the size was around the same or slightly wider (slight!) than our outrigger, but there was no legs! The boat was low and it looked very tiny. I wished the weather was good, because I had never cross open sea with this kind of boat. River, swamp, atolls, no problem. But it was open sea..
(picture by my colleague)
And the goat!.. We were going to travel with the goat. They tied the goat and put it in front of the boat, it’s pitiful, but at least the goat wouldn’t run around in the boat and created havoc. I can’t imagine how the tiny boat would rock if the goat went mad.
Other that the fisherman, there were four or five men, also one family with one young girl and a toddler. So it’s very very full.
We sat in staggered manner because it’s not wide enough to sit side by side. My colleague in front of me, and our friend on the side slightly behind me. The sitting position was so low in corresponding to the water level; the water was so close to us.
After everyone in position, the boat started to move. It was okay at first, we went around the island perimeter, then we reached one of the edge and started to head to the open sea.
Not long in the open sea, we entered the choppy area and the boat started to rock. It felt normal in the beginning, but looking ahead, I saw the sky was grayish and the sea surface was not smooth.
The mother holding the toddler lied down on the boat and they slept, the little girl sat next to them together with the father. The rest of the locals sat in front of them, there were one or two fisherman behind us.
The water started to splash on us and each of us got our poncho ready. Since our boat was so low, the left and right rocking sent water inside.
The sea was getting choppier and everything started to look not good. The boat was rocking violently and we had to hold on to the side, basically sitting on poodle because everything inside was wet. As expected, unlike the previous boat with legs that we took, this one was not as stable. We were worried about our friend who looked very uncomfortable. Even though my colleague is afraid of water, he looked fine.
The wave was getting very high and we were getting more vulnerable. Often, the wave swelled to around three meter high on our left and right, water was pouring in like nobody business, the middle part of the boat that was lower had already been filled up with water. Nobody was dry anymore. The little girl started to cry because she was afraid. The fisherman behind us kept communicating with the guy in front. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but all of us felt the urgency in their voices. Everytime the boat moved, we were having difficulty stabilizing ourselves, knocked each other head, literally, slid or had to grab the boat side on opposite side because it was tilted so much.
At first I was worried about my camera, but now, all I could think about was making a plan if the boat should collapsed or being swollen into the sea. I would ditch my bag, then either grabbing my friends or the children and tried to find something to cling on. I wouldn’t know if I’m able to do or save anything, or even myself, but somehow that was what in my mind. It didn’t look good at all, but I found myself just made peace with it, whatever happens, happens. If it’s meant to be.
Later on when we compared note, apparently my colleague had the same thinking. He was busy filling his mind with visual searching of what he could hold on to in case we collapsed. Both of us were more worried with our friend and tried to give him silent support.
The sea swelled even worse and we found we were trapped inside the 3-4 meter wave around us. (I guessed 3, my colleague guessed 4). So our boat was at the lowest point and all around us were water wall. On that very moment, I felt everything stopped for one still second, and the next moment we were riding the wave on top, then fell down to the ‘valley’ again. Everytime we felt more and more like paper boat getting ready for disaster. The girl cried harder held by the father and the mother had already held the toddler tight.
There was commotion of communication and the fishermen tried hard to control the boat and made a U-turn. It seemed like they give up, we were going back. It was about one hour into the journey, Dili was calling us but we had to turn back, facing the Autaro Island again.
Our mind were racing. We had flight to catch in the afternoon tomorrow, we were instructed to check in early in the morning. Now we were heading back to Autaro, with this kind of sea condition and the remote island, there might not be a way for us to go back Dili in time. If we missed the Saturday flight, the next flight would be Tuesday, if available.
Anyway, safety first, eventhough I only had 50% confidence that we were going to make it safely, because on our way back, we still had to endure the same sea condition, scary waves, strong wind, half dip boat that rocked violently.
Luckily, another half an hour of misery, when we got nearer to the island, the choppiness subsided. The locals looked as if it’s their everyday routine. I couldn’t imagine what the goat felt. We seriously thought about how scary it would be for the goat.
When we finally reached the island, not our lodge, but another side, the locals went down. I saw a guy who looked quite familiar; I think I saw him in the lodge before. He was asking me what happened and I explained to him. He mumbled something, I caught that there might be another boat going to Dili, but I was not sure. The he disappear into the land. We continued the boat journey to our lodge. Upon alighting, the fisherman handed our backpacks. We asked him, Dili? Anymore? He just shook his head.
We dragged ourselves and backpack to the common areas. We had many thoughts and feelings inside our heads. What would we do? If we had to stay another night, we would miss our flight, anyway, the main question, could we ever get out of the island? From here, the weather looked fine, but it was havoc in the middle of the sea. What about rainy and windy weather like yesterday, how would the mid sea like? If we had to stay, we would have to buy food, for how long..? We were almost running out of fresh clothes also.
All the while in the common area, we always saw this small paper advertisement about speed boat connecting Autaro-Dili. I had small hope about speedboat, I think it could be worse. But that might be our only choice. The guys were trying to get phone signal and called the number. I went to toilet. When I was back, my colleague told me he had ordered the speed boat but they could only make it tomorrow morning 9.30, he booked it and it looked like we had to spend another night there.
Still in common area, checking our backpacks, I saw further on the beach, there was a boat and some locals around it. I walked out, before even reached the fence, the guy whom we met at the other beach approached me. He told me that boat was leaving for Dili if there were enough passengers. The boat was bigger, it’s three person wide and longer. It looked sturdier than the previous one.
I went back to ask the guys, I felt this was the better choice for us. Instead of worry about the time, I also worried about speedboat. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I took speedboat in the past, the journey was always restless because of the nature of speedboat banging on sea surface, that was on the calm sea. If my rotten mind: combine speedboat plus longitudinal and vertical waves we encountered, I think it would be as uncomfortable and scary as if our internal organs are shuffled around in the stomach.
Apparently, they were all thinking about the same logic and agreed to take this boat, we quickly grabbed our bags and headed to the boat. The guy who informed us also told me to pay the same amount with the fisherman’s boat, and he disappeared to the land again. Maybe he was the island angel who came to our need!
Flash back for a while, long time ago in uni I took night boat, significantly bigger and higher boat than those fisherman’s boat, equipped with inside cabin etc. It was dark and quite late at night when we started the journey. In the middle, the sea got so rough that water started pouring in from the front. I was sitting on the front deck with one of my friends while the rest were inside the cabin. The sea got so rough, soon half of the front deck was filled with water, and one by one, my other friends all went out to the boat side to empty their stomach. Eventhough I’m prone to seasickness, I actually do very well if I stay in opened area without the smell of the engine. So I was fine in the beginning but looking at everyone, I finally needed to go to the boat edge also, including the friend who was sitting with me, although he was able to hold it longer. So, I think taking small boat in the night or dawn was not a good idea.
So we were happy to get the seven o’clock boat, of course! We didn’t need to wake up dreadfully early too.
That afternoon we also arranged with Masselo for our payment. It cost us US$15 per night per person to stay there, and US$5 for using the kitchen. Overall, we needed to pay 95 bucks. The challenge was to find the change for the money; it probably went around the village to get the change.
It was getting dark and we were preparing the epic bonfire!! This time, we collected a lot of firewood around the beach, we still have the nicely built firepit yesterday. With slight touch up, it’s good to go. Oh ya, I forgot to mention that we got company that afternoon. There was a group of people staying in the lodge too. We didn’t know how many of them, perhaps three man and two women. They had their own speedboat, but whole day long they just went around the island. We passed them, eh, they passed by us many time during our canoeing adventure. Maybe they were looking for a place to stay, before dark, they dropped in the lodge and stayed in two huts some distances from us.
We started to bring out our stuffs. Me and my colleague lighted up the fire, we had so many excess solid fuel to burn! Since it was raining a lot in the day, the woods were damp or wet, so we really needed those solid fuel. We managed to have very good bonfire going on, and this time, we wanted to roast the bakwa, while enjoying tea and coffee and listening to the wave, although too bad, it was starless again. It’s wonderful to be able to enjoy the time, outdoor, with good friends. It kind of bring back good old days, when bunch of friends sitting together in bonfire, either in freezing cold mountain or playing guitar on the beach during weekend event or gathering.
The fun didn’t last long, as suddenly, it was raining again. We were still squatting around for awhile, but at the end we had to run back to the room. We ended up hung around the terrace and in the room with nice candlelight ‘ambience’, drinking hot soup and playing cards, all the while keeping our eyes to the fire.
As a prove that we had solid bonfire, the fire lasted more than half an hour under the rain. We still hopeful that we could continue the bonfire, but the rain never subside.
We played card + mosquito hunt again. Tonight I was not going to give any mosquito a chance to bite me, after the suffering previous night. Our friend actually light up mosquito coils to put on our bed inside the mosquito nets, so it could smoke out every insect that attempt to ambush us later when we got ready to sleep. I also used the mosquito repellent more extensively, ex-ten-sive-ly. Our friend commented that both of us were his ideal traveling companion because we took away most of the mosquito’s attention from him, three of us are mosquito prone, but me and my colleague are the worst.
As predicted, our new neighbor played some music with crackling battery powered radio. Luckily, it was not significant to destroy the peace, if there was, drowned with our laughters.
The night was quite good, I slept well, not as many mosquitoes tried to bother me, the wind was pleasant, but my colleague was restless. I heard him waking up many times. When I asked, he said he was suspicious there were something outside, we did some investigation but all we could see was pitch dark surrounding accompanied by the sound of wave. I woke up few times finding him standing in front of our food rack looking for something with torch, he said he suspected there was a rat trying to steal our food. Good travel companion.. he was croakroach fighter in my previous trip, this trip he was mosquito batman and rat hunter. Mahaha…
Friday, 25th February 2011
Around five o’clock, I couldn’t sleep already, anyway, my goal on our last morning was to take picture of sunrise. So quietly I grabbed the camera and sneaked out. It was still dark outside, but further in the horizon I could see the cyan sky. I went out to the beach, to sit down enjoying the cool breeze, surrounding and taking pictures. There was a fisherman middling with his boat further away, I suspect that would be out boat for later.
Not more than ten minutes I was out, my colleague was already behind me, taking pictures too. The sky started to turn orange but there was no sunrise for the cloudy weather. Our friend was also waked up and we heard him packing.
I had basically packed most of my stuff and we had finished most of our food supply, except chocolates. Both of us went back to pack the rest of everything, especially laundry that we left outside on the railing. Learning from the boat ride, we waterproof everything, I put three layer of plastic for my camera. I showered for the last time, I think we also drank some soup before proceed to the shore.
The boat that I saw was indeed the boat for us, and a bunch of locals, and a goat. When we saw the boat, straightaway we had concern. It’s not an outrigger, the size was around the same or slightly wider (slight!) than our outrigger, but there was no legs! The boat was low and it looked very tiny. I wished the weather was good, because I had never cross open sea with this kind of boat. River, swamp, atolls, no problem. But it was open sea..
(picture by my colleague)And the goat!.. We were going to travel with the goat. They tied the goat and put it in front of the boat, it’s pitiful, but at least the goat wouldn’t run around in the boat and created havoc. I can’t imagine how the tiny boat would rock if the goat went mad.
Other that the fisherman, there were four or five men, also one family with one young girl and a toddler. So it’s very very full.
We sat in staggered manner because it’s not wide enough to sit side by side. My colleague in front of me, and our friend on the side slightly behind me. The sitting position was so low in corresponding to the water level; the water was so close to us.
After everyone in position, the boat started to move. It was okay at first, we went around the island perimeter, then we reached one of the edge and started to head to the open sea.
Not long in the open sea, we entered the choppy area and the boat started to rock. It felt normal in the beginning, but looking ahead, I saw the sky was grayish and the sea surface was not smooth.
The mother holding the toddler lied down on the boat and they slept, the little girl sat next to them together with the father. The rest of the locals sat in front of them, there were one or two fisherman behind us.
The water started to splash on us and each of us got our poncho ready. Since our boat was so low, the left and right rocking sent water inside.
The sea was getting choppier and everything started to look not good. The boat was rocking violently and we had to hold on to the side, basically sitting on poodle because everything inside was wet. As expected, unlike the previous boat with legs that we took, this one was not as stable. We were worried about our friend who looked very uncomfortable. Even though my colleague is afraid of water, he looked fine.
The wave was getting very high and we were getting more vulnerable. Often, the wave swelled to around three meter high on our left and right, water was pouring in like nobody business, the middle part of the boat that was lower had already been filled up with water. Nobody was dry anymore. The little girl started to cry because she was afraid. The fisherman behind us kept communicating with the guy in front. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but all of us felt the urgency in their voices. Everytime the boat moved, we were having difficulty stabilizing ourselves, knocked each other head, literally, slid or had to grab the boat side on opposite side because it was tilted so much.
At first I was worried about my camera, but now, all I could think about was making a plan if the boat should collapsed or being swollen into the sea. I would ditch my bag, then either grabbing my friends or the children and tried to find something to cling on. I wouldn’t know if I’m able to do or save anything, or even myself, but somehow that was what in my mind. It didn’t look good at all, but I found myself just made peace with it, whatever happens, happens. If it’s meant to be.
Later on when we compared note, apparently my colleague had the same thinking. He was busy filling his mind with visual searching of what he could hold on to in case we collapsed. Both of us were more worried with our friend and tried to give him silent support.
The sea swelled even worse and we found we were trapped inside the 3-4 meter wave around us. (I guessed 3, my colleague guessed 4). So our boat was at the lowest point and all around us were water wall. On that very moment, I felt everything stopped for one still second, and the next moment we were riding the wave on top, then fell down to the ‘valley’ again. Everytime we felt more and more like paper boat getting ready for disaster. The girl cried harder held by the father and the mother had already held the toddler tight.
There was commotion of communication and the fishermen tried hard to control the boat and made a U-turn. It seemed like they give up, we were going back. It was about one hour into the journey, Dili was calling us but we had to turn back, facing the Autaro Island again.
Our mind were racing. We had flight to catch in the afternoon tomorrow, we were instructed to check in early in the morning. Now we were heading back to Autaro, with this kind of sea condition and the remote island, there might not be a way for us to go back Dili in time. If we missed the Saturday flight, the next flight would be Tuesday, if available.
Anyway, safety first, eventhough I only had 50% confidence that we were going to make it safely, because on our way back, we still had to endure the same sea condition, scary waves, strong wind, half dip boat that rocked violently.
Luckily, another half an hour of misery, when we got nearer to the island, the choppiness subsided. The locals looked as if it’s their everyday routine. I couldn’t imagine what the goat felt. We seriously thought about how scary it would be for the goat.
When we finally reached the island, not our lodge, but another side, the locals went down. I saw a guy who looked quite familiar; I think I saw him in the lodge before. He was asking me what happened and I explained to him. He mumbled something, I caught that there might be another boat going to Dili, but I was not sure. The he disappear into the land. We continued the boat journey to our lodge. Upon alighting, the fisherman handed our backpacks. We asked him, Dili? Anymore? He just shook his head.
We dragged ourselves and backpack to the common areas. We had many thoughts and feelings inside our heads. What would we do? If we had to stay another night, we would miss our flight, anyway, the main question, could we ever get out of the island? From here, the weather looked fine, but it was havoc in the middle of the sea. What about rainy and windy weather like yesterday, how would the mid sea like? If we had to stay, we would have to buy food, for how long..? We were almost running out of fresh clothes also.
All the while in the common area, we always saw this small paper advertisement about speed boat connecting Autaro-Dili. I had small hope about speedboat, I think it could be worse. But that might be our only choice. The guys were trying to get phone signal and called the number. I went to toilet. When I was back, my colleague told me he had ordered the speed boat but they could only make it tomorrow morning 9.30, he booked it and it looked like we had to spend another night there.
Still in common area, checking our backpacks, I saw further on the beach, there was a boat and some locals around it. I walked out, before even reached the fence, the guy whom we met at the other beach approached me. He told me that boat was leaving for Dili if there were enough passengers. The boat was bigger, it’s three person wide and longer. It looked sturdier than the previous one.
I went back to ask the guys, I felt this was the better choice for us. Instead of worry about the time, I also worried about speedboat. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I took speedboat in the past, the journey was always restless because of the nature of speedboat banging on sea surface, that was on the calm sea. If my rotten mind: combine speedboat plus longitudinal and vertical waves we encountered, I think it would be as uncomfortable and scary as if our internal organs are shuffled around in the stomach.
Apparently, they were all thinking about the same logic and agreed to take this boat, we quickly grabbed our bags and headed to the boat. The guy who informed us also told me to pay the same amount with the fisherman’s boat, and he disappeared to the land again. Maybe he was the island angel who came to our need!
this one looks better rite? rite??(picture by my colleague)
After loading the backpacks, we hung around with the locals under the tree. We couldn’t really communicate well, we just sat there, using some sign or broken languages, and also distributed our snickers to them. From the distance, a group of locals was approaching; it’s the same passengers who shared the boat with us earlier. This time the goat walked by itself and it wouldn’t be tied. They had one low compartment in front where the goat can rest.
There were few rows of seating on the side; middle part was used to put stuffs, protected by body bags, after that there were two rows of seats. We occupied last row, behind us was the higher wooden area covering the engine etc. This middle part had some canvas roofing. There were some spaces for the boatman and crew.
After everyone onboard, we started the journey again, my colleague sat in the middle of two of us. All of us hoped for better and safe journey, the weather was hotter now, could be better sign, but no one was sure what the mid sea like.
We travelled along the perimeter of the island to pick up even more passengers, I think there were at least twenty over people onboard. The last badge of passengers with one boy sat in front of us, there were all very friendly. One of the local old man could speak English, apparently he knew that we were the group from Singapore.
Wow, we were famous! This was another part of the island and they knew us. Haha…maybe it was the news in the island that these three kids stood out because we were crappy at canoeing, running around the beach like crazy, making bonfire for nothing, and distributing funny foods. Hm.. not many people do the combination of all those things.
Anyway, their friendliness lighted up our mood a lot. Everyone including us was busy helping the boatman pulling the canvas here and there, probably to make the boat more adaptable to the sea and wind condition. As we heading the open sea, the sea started to get choppy again. We wore the raincoat and hoping for the best.
In the mid sea, the condition was almost similar to our morning journey, but it was really a better boat, more stabilized and less scary. It was still horrible, especially when we were two third of the journey, the boat was rocking violently and it looked like were trapped in the same situation. The engine had to be turned off many times and we were again riding the wave and under the valley. Dilli looked so near yet so far. Again, commotion of communication, we were wondering if we had to make U-turn again and prayed that we didn’t need too…what a journey!
But they said practices make perfect. Even our friend now didn’t look as uncomfortable as previously, probably the long journey also gave him the – whatever- feeling.
We managed to ride through the rough area, the sea was less choppy and some points I felt so sleepy because of motion sickness pill I took before boarding the second boat, upon experiencing the crazy sea. To entertain us, my colleague started our basic-favorite-slightly moronic play, scissor paper stone. Haha… we got into it until we were embarrassed because the boy was looking at us, grinning from ear to ear. It’s kid’s game, and we were bloody old adults.
The day was getting pretty hot and humid everyone soon had to take off raincoats.
The sea was still rocking, but beyond the grayish sky, we finally saw the row of boat near the Dili jetty. It was probably afternoon already, perhaps 3-4 pm or more after three and half hour journey. We slid through the row of boats when the water got murkier because we were reaching the shore.
I can’t express the feeling of dipping our feet into the water, standing again, in the shore of Dili. We made it! We finally made it. Safe and sound. In one piece. I felt dirty and sandy, it was not skin when I touched my face. With tired face, we congratulated each other and made a very big decision; we needed cold drink, the most colorful, cold and sugar loaded drink that we could find. Bags on our shoulder, raincoat stuffed messily on the side, we paid the fisherman and walked off the shore. Our friend got some green slimy stuff on his slipper, it kinda looked like shit. Told you, the trip was literally full of shit. He he..we helped him to find water to rinse it off.
At first, we wanted to walk to the supermarket but it was quite a distance away and we were beat. Luckily, we found street cart and bought the much needed drinks with some extra for consumption in the hotel later.
We flagged a cab; the rate should be 1-2 USD to our hotel. The driver tried to elevated the price at about 5 to 10 times, he gave up the second we named the right price since he must had guess that we knew the market price already.
We got our room back! With nice and clean towels. The most impressive and magical things, I haven’t found other hotels with this capability, the hotel told us they can wash our laundry and got it back on that very night. Again, unlimited and free. I love love love it. We love love love it. Especially to consider the fact, what could these three kampong wannabe crazy kids bring back after three days adventures and long journey on the sea? Dirty laundry.
We took turn to clean up and how nice it was to have great shower. Eventhough we were damn tired before, the spirit and energy came back and soon we had the idea to explore the back part of the hotel. They have the hotel extension high high up so that the guests can see the sea from their balcony. How nice. It was not yet in operation, so we climbed up with our drinks and went to the big terrace, sitting down, looking at the sea and just relax.
The flowing breeze made the guys looked sleepy. We could easily knock off right there but then there were quite a number of mosquitoes. After slapping here and there, we decided it was time for dinner. Anyway, we didn’t have proper meal today. I might mistaken the chronology of the things we did (that is the punishment of dragging completing the journal for 3 months!!), but I think that is 90% correct.
At first we wanted to just had dinner at the hotel then we remember it was Friday night. They served variety of food on weekend, so we walked back to the seaside restaurant we patronized on the first night, hoping to find the friendly aunties and their foods. Yummm……
It was kind of mixed feeling that night. One side we felt relieved that we could make it home as scheduled, on the other hand that would be our last night in Timor Leste.
The wind was very strong and it was impossible to sit outside, even the lights inside were flying left and right. We kept looking and the sea and had to be grateful that we were on this side of the island. I could imagine us stuck in Autaro, cooking noodle, chasing mosquitoes, running out of supplies, but I’m very very sure it wouldn’t be bad. We would still make the best of the situations. I know I would. I know they would. What is important, we would be somewhere safe together.
My friends ordered their food, fried rice, smashed chicken, some bean curd, fruit juices etc.
I ordered my favorite seaside on-Indonesian-trip food. Ikan goreng tok. It’s fried fish. Just like that, no sauce, no funny dressing, no this or that. With white rice and hunger. Yummy!!!
It was indeed yummy that my friends were jealous and three of us decided to have another helping together.
We were happy, well-fed and energetic. For this trip, I think we were mostly lost a bit of weight because of the activities, type of food and lack of street food that we could gnaw. But tonight dinner kind of making up for it.
We walked back to the hotel, showered again, and had our last night of card playing. The rules were blurred, we got a bit more brutal that at the end of night, there were a few casualties of card. Torn, missing, not worthy condition. We also finished packing. The guys had much less stuff since all foods were finished. Their toiletries were also finished but I had enough to spare.
We played, chit chat, made toast for the trip and called it a night. Everyone slept like a log.
Saturday, 26th February 2010
Sleeping late??? Nooo… not with us, not for the trip arranged by us. Holiday is having good time outside, out..! Regardless how nice is the hotel, the time is supposed to be spent outside.
So early in the morning, we were already awake and showered. We ate breakfast in the restaurant, and off we went out for the last exploration.
Our flight was around 3.25 pm, we were told to check-in at 10 am (Nuts! That is 4.5 hours in advance!) by the Singapore side who arrange for the ticket but we were not convinced. We checked with the hotel, they said it was okay to leave about at 1.30 pm.
So we were going to explore the small hill further beside the hotel, there was a small track from the road where we could hike up. It was quite steep and those kind of terrain that is not fun when you are going down, it’s more fun to slide sitting down because it was steep.
On the way up, we met a family of pigs. First, we saw the father, black color, standing in the middle of the path. Looking at us and not moving. Although we were three much bigger sized human being, we kind of thought “what should we do if this little piggy jumped on us and bite?” So we approached slowly, it was still looking at us for a distance, until it decided to just grunted and disappeared through the bushes. When we walked pass and looked back, we found out the reason. Another piggy, appeared from the bush, followed by one, two, three, cute little tiny piglets with different colors. So the father was guiding the family, the mother was the pig we met on the first day.
the father pig scaling his opponents
the mother pig and one piglet..
and another piglet..
and another piglet...!
After loading the backpacks, we hung around with the locals under the tree. We couldn’t really communicate well, we just sat there, using some sign or broken languages, and also distributed our snickers to them. From the distance, a group of locals was approaching; it’s the same passengers who shared the boat with us earlier. This time the goat walked by itself and it wouldn’t be tied. They had one low compartment in front where the goat can rest.
There were few rows of seating on the side; middle part was used to put stuffs, protected by body bags, after that there were two rows of seats. We occupied last row, behind us was the higher wooden area covering the engine etc. This middle part had some canvas roofing. There were some spaces for the boatman and crew.
After everyone onboard, we started the journey again, my colleague sat in the middle of two of us. All of us hoped for better and safe journey, the weather was hotter now, could be better sign, but no one was sure what the mid sea like.
We travelled along the perimeter of the island to pick up even more passengers, I think there were at least twenty over people onboard. The last badge of passengers with one boy sat in front of us, there were all very friendly. One of the local old man could speak English, apparently he knew that we were the group from Singapore.
Wow, we were famous! This was another part of the island and they knew us. Haha…maybe it was the news in the island that these three kids stood out because we were crappy at canoeing, running around the beach like crazy, making bonfire for nothing, and distributing funny foods. Hm.. not many people do the combination of all those things.
Anyway, their friendliness lighted up our mood a lot. Everyone including us was busy helping the boatman pulling the canvas here and there, probably to make the boat more adaptable to the sea and wind condition. As we heading the open sea, the sea started to get choppy again. We wore the raincoat and hoping for the best.
In the mid sea, the condition was almost similar to our morning journey, but it was really a better boat, more stabilized and less scary. It was still horrible, especially when we were two third of the journey, the boat was rocking violently and it looked like were trapped in the same situation. The engine had to be turned off many times and we were again riding the wave and under the valley. Dilli looked so near yet so far. Again, commotion of communication, we were wondering if we had to make U-turn again and prayed that we didn’t need too…what a journey!
But they said practices make perfect. Even our friend now didn’t look as uncomfortable as previously, probably the long journey also gave him the – whatever- feeling.
We managed to ride through the rough area, the sea was less choppy and some points I felt so sleepy because of motion sickness pill I took before boarding the second boat, upon experiencing the crazy sea. To entertain us, my colleague started our basic-favorite-slightly moronic play, scissor paper stone. Haha… we got into it until we were embarrassed because the boy was looking at us, grinning from ear to ear. It’s kid’s game, and we were bloody old adults.
The day was getting pretty hot and humid everyone soon had to take off raincoats.
The sea was still rocking, but beyond the grayish sky, we finally saw the row of boat near the Dili jetty. It was probably afternoon already, perhaps 3-4 pm or more after three and half hour journey. We slid through the row of boats when the water got murkier because we were reaching the shore.
I can’t express the feeling of dipping our feet into the water, standing again, in the shore of Dili. We made it! We finally made it. Safe and sound. In one piece. I felt dirty and sandy, it was not skin when I touched my face. With tired face, we congratulated each other and made a very big decision; we needed cold drink, the most colorful, cold and sugar loaded drink that we could find. Bags on our shoulder, raincoat stuffed messily on the side, we paid the fisherman and walked off the shore. Our friend got some green slimy stuff on his slipper, it kinda looked like shit. Told you, the trip was literally full of shit. He he..we helped him to find water to rinse it off.
At first, we wanted to walk to the supermarket but it was quite a distance away and we were beat. Luckily, we found street cart and bought the much needed drinks with some extra for consumption in the hotel later.
We flagged a cab; the rate should be 1-2 USD to our hotel. The driver tried to elevated the price at about 5 to 10 times, he gave up the second we named the right price since he must had guess that we knew the market price already.
We got our room back! With nice and clean towels. The most impressive and magical things, I haven’t found other hotels with this capability, the hotel told us they can wash our laundry and got it back on that very night. Again, unlimited and free. I love love love it. We love love love it. Especially to consider the fact, what could these three kampong wannabe crazy kids bring back after three days adventures and long journey on the sea? Dirty laundry.
We took turn to clean up and how nice it was to have great shower. Eventhough we were damn tired before, the spirit and energy came back and soon we had the idea to explore the back part of the hotel. They have the hotel extension high high up so that the guests can see the sea from their balcony. How nice. It was not yet in operation, so we climbed up with our drinks and went to the big terrace, sitting down, looking at the sea and just relax.
The flowing breeze made the guys looked sleepy. We could easily knock off right there but then there were quite a number of mosquitoes. After slapping here and there, we decided it was time for dinner. Anyway, we didn’t have proper meal today. I might mistaken the chronology of the things we did (that is the punishment of dragging completing the journal for 3 months!!), but I think that is 90% correct.
At first we wanted to just had dinner at the hotel then we remember it was Friday night. They served variety of food on weekend, so we walked back to the seaside restaurant we patronized on the first night, hoping to find the friendly aunties and their foods. Yummm……
It was kind of mixed feeling that night. One side we felt relieved that we could make it home as scheduled, on the other hand that would be our last night in Timor Leste.
The wind was very strong and it was impossible to sit outside, even the lights inside were flying left and right. We kept looking and the sea and had to be grateful that we were on this side of the island. I could imagine us stuck in Autaro, cooking noodle, chasing mosquitoes, running out of supplies, but I’m very very sure it wouldn’t be bad. We would still make the best of the situations. I know I would. I know they would. What is important, we would be somewhere safe together.
My friends ordered their food, fried rice, smashed chicken, some bean curd, fruit juices etc.
I ordered my favorite seaside on-Indonesian-trip food. Ikan goreng tok. It’s fried fish. Just like that, no sauce, no funny dressing, no this or that. With white rice and hunger. Yummy!!!
It was indeed yummy that my friends were jealous and three of us decided to have another helping together.
We were happy, well-fed and energetic. For this trip, I think we were mostly lost a bit of weight because of the activities, type of food and lack of street food that we could gnaw. But tonight dinner kind of making up for it.
We walked back to the hotel, showered again, and had our last night of card playing. The rules were blurred, we got a bit more brutal that at the end of night, there were a few casualties of card. Torn, missing, not worthy condition. We also finished packing. The guys had much less stuff since all foods were finished. Their toiletries were also finished but I had enough to spare.
We played, chit chat, made toast for the trip and called it a night. Everyone slept like a log.
Saturday, 26th February 2010
Sleeping late??? Nooo… not with us, not for the trip arranged by us. Holiday is having good time outside, out..! Regardless how nice is the hotel, the time is supposed to be spent outside.
So early in the morning, we were already awake and showered. We ate breakfast in the restaurant, and off we went out for the last exploration.
Our flight was around 3.25 pm, we were told to check-in at 10 am (Nuts! That is 4.5 hours in advance!) by the Singapore side who arrange for the ticket but we were not convinced. We checked with the hotel, they said it was okay to leave about at 1.30 pm.
So we were going to explore the small hill further beside the hotel, there was a small track from the road where we could hike up. It was quite steep and those kind of terrain that is not fun when you are going down, it’s more fun to slide sitting down because it was steep.
On the way up, we met a family of pigs. First, we saw the father, black color, standing in the middle of the path. Looking at us and not moving. Although we were three much bigger sized human being, we kind of thought “what should we do if this little piggy jumped on us and bite?” So we approached slowly, it was still looking at us for a distance, until it decided to just grunted and disappeared through the bushes. When we walked pass and looked back, we found out the reason. Another piggy, appeared from the bush, followed by one, two, three, cute little tiny piglets with different colors. So the father was guiding the family, the mother was the pig we met on the first day.
the father pig scaling his opponents
the mother pig and one piglet..
and another piglet..
and another piglet...!We continued to go up until one point our friend decided that he just wanted to relax and asked us to go up ourselves. So both me and my colleague ran up the hill, we could see nice scenery overlooking the sea along the way. We went further up and up until we decided to finally go down before our friend waited too long.
After that, we walked along the shore again. Everything kind of added up as opening and closing. The pig, the walk along the shore and later, the lunch at the restaurant.
lonely tree
not so lonely tree
lonely boat
not so lonely nets
lonely boat....This time we walked further up until the end of the shore, taking pictures or just enjoying ourselves and preserving the memory of Dili beach. We caught a guy pedaling a bicycle cart selling cokes, just nice to accompany our walk.
We saw goats wandering around, fishermen rearing nets, one local family bringing their kid to play in the water, a dog basking under the sun. It’s just a typical morning for a nice life.
the coastal road
mangrove area
We finally said goodbye to the beach and went to the hotel to shower again, made payment and check out to have our lunch. There was a woman appearing before our lunch was served, asking us to leave at one o’clock. She was one of the guests of the hotel, apparently was going to take the same flight with us, therefore we would be sharing same car to airport. She said that the counter could be closed early so we better moved early.
So we basically had 5 minutes to finish our food. We gave her the benefit of the doubt, but if she made it up…huh..
When we reached the airport, it was just a medium sized hall and there was long queue, all Caucasians in uniform flying to Singapore. If the woman was worried that the counter was to be closed early, she should be relieved, because the counter might be closed later than the flight! The check-in took up all the nickelodeon shenanigan ngejubaelah time that it was barely ten minutes before the flight when we finally got our turn, and there were still people behind us, and there were still airport tax to pay and immigration to clear...
The flight was, again, nickelodeon shenanigan ngejubaelah full that I heard we couldn’t sit together when the guys did the check-in. So I was sitting with my colleague and our friend had to sit in the middle with others, all on the latest row.
So there it was, on our way back to Singapore. The four hour flight was another roller coaster ride, to be hyperbolic. But the plane encountered bad turbulences along the way, those kind that if you hold a glass to your face, the water was spilling over from all edges.
What a trip. Hot, cold, turbulence, wave, rain, mountain, sea…
We collected our luggages and had our dinner in the airport, we got one day to rest before going back to work on Monday. Our faces were much darker, mine being inverted raccoon as the souvenir of the trip. Come to think of it, we never had any shopping, all we did was visiting the street side warung or small supermarket for groceries. He he he.. we did collect some sea shell but the best was, of course, pictures and memories. And feeling grateful to have great travel companion, perhaps we were long lost childhood friends, we clicked so well and we all behaved like ten-years old. Young at heart. Young at heart. Should be. Always.
Will miss you Dili and Autaro.
