At one with nature – East Timor 27th April 2007

East Timor is not a place for the squeamish or insect phobic, apart from mosquitoes; we have mice, geckos, ants, tics, termites, grubs, wasps, spiders, centipedes and even crabs! (And that’s just in the house!) A few months ago the visa card reader gave up the ghost; the cause of death was gecko shit! Apparently if a gecko shits on you it’s supposed to be lucky, (East Timor’s equivalent to seagulls), well that’s what I tried to convinced Rob when he got peed upon one night. Ants are also destructive to electrical appliances; our kitchen light went kaput because ants have chewed through the wiring. Not to mention the bamboo grubs that live and eat their way through our patio furniture, luckily it was a regular customer that was sitting on the chair when it collapsed. Some insects have collective names; all big spiders are Boris’s and all crabs that wander in from the beach are Colin’s.

I’ve been away from East Timor for about 6 weeks in the somewhat more civilized UK. After this amount of time you become somewhat complacent with the technology and choice and forget that back here you have to deal with slow and clunky internet connections, constant dirt under your fingernails and the necessity of slathering yourself with mosquito repellent. Back to the real world! Oh, the luxury of walking into someone’s place, opening your laptop and connecting to their wireless broadband, or walking into a Tesco’s superstore and blowing your mind with the choice and range of goodies for sale. INet and Leader just don’t cut it.

I kept an eye on the news from Dili through two blog sites ‘Xanana Republic Gazette’ and ‘Diligence’, both of which are very amusing reading. I was planning to return after the presidential elections, but in true Timor style, they all went badly wrong. You would think that in a country of 1 million people, 520,000 of eligible voting age, someone would notice that an extra 200,000 had voted, doh! They did! So a revote is now happening in May. What I can’t understand is the voting system was supposed to be fingerprint voting with adjudicators that have been here for months, how the hell did they manage to get an extra 200,000 votes?

So I returned anyway and managed to get away with nearly 40 kilos of luggage which is double the allowance. I hung round the check-in desk in Bali, prostituting myself to every passenger that looked like they were underweight, trying to check in with them. Eventually the check-in guy got either fed up with me or felt sorry for me and checked my bags in without a quibble. Returning to Dili International Airport, I made an arrangement with one of the Timorese Nationals, a lovely guy called Olivio. As he wouldn’t have the delay of getting a visa, he would nab me a trolley for my copious amount of luggage. Speaking from a bad previous experience, I didn’t want to be dragging two very large bags of dive gear through the airport. However being a prestigious international airport with 140 people coming in at a time, they only have 12 trolleys in total. Luckily, Olivio nabbed the last one for me.

Wielding a severely overloaded and very precarious trolley (I still managed to get the one with the dodgy wheel!); I met Wayne & Ann who took me off to the traditional welcoming ceremony, a Tiger beer at the airport bar. After observing how white I was, I gave Ann her traditional present of 200 menthol cigarettes (a rare commodity in East Timor). Last time I returned Wayne had commented (tongue in cheek) that he never got a present, so I brought him back a bumper bag of Cheesy Wotsists from the UK. It’s amazing how these chemically flavoured, orange finger staining, little puffs of corn bring such joy to a grown man’s palette.

Tomorrow, I’ll get my act together and sort out my schedule for the next few weeks and then Sunday I’m diving, I can’t wait to get back in the water again and top up my rapidly fading tan.

I’m now writing this thinking back to the UK where I would listen to the distant hum of traffic on the M4 and Heathrow bound planes circling overhead, now I have the gentle lapping of the sea and the distant whine of Blackhawks overhead. The dogs went into overdrive during the night so when bleary eyed I was asked how I slept; I replied that ‘I heard Boris darking all night!’ And now we have our first power cut of the day so the sea is drowned out by the droning of the generator. Welcome back to East Timor!