The Youngest East Timorese Diver – East Timor 20th October 2007

Nugie has had a great week; she has been a bridesmaid, she had a birthday party and she became the youngest East Timorese diver ever.

Nugie, Jose, Marianne and Jurgen, Dili Rock, 18th October 2007

On the 22nd of August 2007, Nugie (Gracilda Amaral Soares) became the youngest ever East Timorese to breathe on scuba in the Hotel Esplanada pool. At that stage she was nine years old and did a PADI Bubblemaker. This entails throwing around an underwater torpedo, swimming through hoops, doing handstands and basically having fun. The 17th of October was her 10th birthday and after sitting through a PADI DVD, with help from one of our wonderful diving staff on the hard translation bits, she completed her first confined water session with me. Today, the day after her 10th birthday, she became the youngest ever Timorese to breathe on scuba in the Open Water, she is also the youngest in East Timor to complete the PADI Discover Scuba Diving Course. What a birthday present!

Anjleen Hannak of course is still the youngest PADI Open Water Diver in East Timor, qualifying at the age of 10; she is now 11 and a veteran diver with 26 open water dives. But who knows how long she will hold this title.

Living in East Timor, it’s hard to keep in touch with people; I guess that’s why I started this blog. Whilst the media were sensationalising events here, I wanted to reassure loved ones that I wasn’t living in the dangerous minefield of violence that some TV networks made it out to be. Email etc. may seem a little impersonal at times but other communication methods can be challenging; my UK SIM card does not work in East Timor and my East Timor SIM card allows me to text Indonesia, randomly Australia but not the UK! There is one place at Tiger Fuels that has 24hour broadband with Skype facilities, but the time difference with the UK is another challenge as East Timor is 9hrs ahead.

The phone company here is called Timor Telecom and they have the monopoly on the telecommunications network. You can get a land line, but telephone lines get stolen for the copper, so like a friend of mine, you can find yourself without a land line for over six months. Most people use mobile phones to communicate which you recharge using scratch cards bought from small boys at the side of the road. Call costs are horrendous, so most of us use text. Personally, I have never been a fan of text as they seem impersonal and can be misinterpreted, but the cost of voice calls makes them necessary.

However, the Philippinos love to text and seem to have their own text language. The first text I ever received started with ‘Gd am’. It took me about 10 minutes to realise that ‘Gd am’ was ‘Good Morning!’

Back to Timor Telecom; they made themselves extremely unpopular last year at the beginning of the crisis when telephone network crashed making telecommunication total impossible. Trying to raise their image they introduced voice mail a couple of months ago, this was a fiasco because your phone automatically diverted into voice mail but you couldn’t retrieve them. In the first week we got 44 voice mail messages that we couldn’t listen to. Now we have managed to shut the service off.

On the 17th, it was Timor Telecoms 5th anniversary, so at 7am everyone in the country received a text message to recharge their phone before midnight and receive double the credit value. This threw the whole country’s telephone network into chaos again. No-one could make calls, send texts or recharge their phone, the network was always busy, it just couldn’t cope. I started to recharge my phone at 6.30 pm and still hadn’t succeeded at 7am the next morning. Bruce was smug though as he had been to the Timor Telecom office and paid $50 over the counter. They automatically credited him $100 using their computer. ‘That was a good idea’ Ann exclaimed, ‘why didn’t you ring us and tell us?’ Bruce’s reply, ‘Because the phones were down!’

New restaurants, bars and massage parlours are still springing up around town. There’s even the odd tattoo parlour; however, the one on the Comoro road advertising ‘Tatto’ doesn’t inspire much confidence.

By the way, for anyone reading this in the UK; the programme featuring Ross Kemp in East Timor is being shown on Monday the 22nd. I think it is channel 4, but I’m not sure.

Dugongs, Whales and Rays – East Timor 13th October 2007

We have had an influx of visa runner backpackers recently, word must have got out it’s safe to come to East Timor again. If you want to get another visa for Indonesia, you must leave the country and East Timor is one of the cheapest options as it doesn’t mean paying for an international flight if you come over the border at Kupang. So many Backpackers come here and wait a week (5 working days) for their new 2 month Indonesian visa. Meanwhile they enjoy the delights of East Timor which at the moment is a superb time to visit, the water is fantastic, some of the best diving of the year as its whale season, the city is calm and becoming vibrant again, and there is the occasional low flying Blackhawk to add to the quirkiness of the place. Backpackers love it, they go out to the districts and get greeted by smiling faces, fantastic scenery and hundreds of kids shouting ‘Malai, Malai’ as they pass, coupled with 41 different nationalities of UN Police with guns patrolling the roads.

But why is it that all the backpackers look like Jesus? Wispy goatee beards, long hair, and clothes that they look like they have slept in for a week. The Timorese can’t understand how these Malai can afford to come here on an aeroplane yet cannot afford clothes! There are other cultural issues where I wish some of these ‘travellers’ would do their homework, for example bikinis are a no-no here, to a Timorese you are running around in your underwear! And public affection is also a no-no, snogging in the street is equivalent to full on sex, it’s just not done. Still, they are bringing fresh dollars into the local economy, especially the little Timorese restaurants and fruit and vegetable stalls because these guys eat cheap. I don’t suppose I was any different when I was backpacking (no goatee beard though!)

We all have been doing so much diving recently and it’s been superb. At K41, we have had a dugong for over a week and I’ve dived with it twice. One day, on the surface we had dugong, humpback whales and dolphins, the day before Wayne had seen orcas in the bay. I took a couple of Spanish tourist there who only had one day to dive. The first dive we had a huge Maori Wrasse swim right in front of us, then the second dive we had barracuda, banded pipefish, loads of unusual nudibranch, an anglerfish and then the dugong came into play twice! They were very happy divers.

K57 is also superb at the moment; this dive site can only be dived in the dry season as the Manatutu River is nearby. It’s a long way and very hot, but well worth the effort as it is a stunning wall dive. One day we saw a humpback come up three times in the bay and today, apart from nudibranch sex everywhere, we had a mobular ray, which looks like a small manta ray. I keep mentioning nudibranch, for the uninitiated these are very colourful sea slugs which divers, especially marine biologists go crazy for. At the moment this reefs are teeming with them, we are seeing unusual types and many of them are having sex. Pornography under water!

At Bob’s Rock I saw a nice big reef shark, some new nudibranch that I haven’t seen before, two leaf scorpion fish of different colours posing on a barrel sponge and a ribbon eel. Photographer’s paradise! Yesterday at this same site, in addition to the leaf scorpion fish, there was a barracuda and large black anglerfish. Then on the way home on the boat we were surrounded by a pod of dolphins that played at the bow of the boat, then started a jumping display. This delighted our clients, all of which had never seen dolphins up close in their natural habitat before.

Work is keeping me so busy that I haven’t really had time to muse over life in Dili, everything seems to be calm, the streets are busy and apart from a temporary milk and cement shortage, life is pretty normal. The only unusual thing was watching the Kiwi cops practicing the Hakka. The Kiwi contingent of the UN Police are on rotation. After six months, the old ones leave and a new batch come in, so in keeping with tradition they perform the Haka to each other on the tarmac of the airport, we watched the practice run at the Hotel Esplanada which was very entertaining.