Taxi Terror – East Timor 26th December 2007

The taxis here in Dili usually sport a windscreen banner such as ‘Tomboy’, ‘Remember’ and ‘White Zombie’, to name but a few. The banners obscure all but a strip of windscreen which they peer out of and dangly things such as religious ornaments and cuddly toys usually adorn their mirrors. There doesn’t seem to be any regulations concerning taxi roadworthiness, they all travel at 25km per hour and as long as their horn works any fare is fair game. Taxi fares before the crisis were $1 but went up to $2 around town. However, Joey got in a cab that broke down 3 times on the way to his destination and to his horror he realised the taxi driver didn’t have any brakes. This fact he gathered when he saw the driver (rapidly approaching parked traffic) desperately pumping the brakes, then yanking the handbrake and as a last ditch attempt, sticking his foot out of the drivers side door and dragging his flip-flop along the ground. After an hour of gritted teeth on this precarious journey, the cab driver had the audacity to try and charge him $3! Unfortunately this one wasn’t sporting a banner, so we would know which one to avoid.

We have had a series of unofficial roadblocks around town outside the nativity scenes. The locals put rocks in the road to slow down the traffic, effectively making some two way roads single lane. I don’t blame them as there has been so much rain recently, you don’t want the UN haring through puddles and soaking baby Jesus or in the case of the one outside the Australian Embassy, the kangaroo. I thought Mary and Joseph had a cow, a lamb and 3 wise men in the stable, I can’t recall a kangaroo!

Honestly though, you have to be extra careful driving at the moment, because of all the puddles you are likely to get a motorbike or cyclist pulling straight out in front of you (mirrors don’t exist on two wheel modes of transport). I’ve watched some UN vehicles treating the puddles like a game, screaming down the road seeing how many Timorese they can soak en-route. I nearly got pushed off of the road today by a UN cop, registration number UN 0116, trying to overtake me on a bend then finding himself face to face with a nativity road block, so rather than pull back he cut me up pushed me off of the road. If I had been in the truck I may have stood my ground but I’m driving my friends car while he is on holiday, so I had to content myself with a lot of swearing, horn blowing and rude hand signals.

Christmas Eve we got burgled by some local scroates who saw the Christmas booze being loaded into the house, then the boys leaving to collect some food. They jumped over the back wall and slit open the mosquito net on my window with a knife. They raided my room and took $450, 2 credit cards and all my swimming costumes (strange huh!), then went through the house nicking a pair of binoculars, two cases of tiger and a bottle of gin, before escaping through the back door and back over the wall with my pushbike, amazingly. Now you would think the dogs would have created alarming which Ann would have heard because frighteningly she was in the house at the time, but she didn’t hear a thing. So we suspect that the scroates threw some food over which was drugged as the dogs were off of their dinner that night, and if you have ever met Doris, you know that that is a rare occasion. So that took the stuffing out of Christmas for me having to rustle up phone cards to ring the UK and cancel credit cards, then dealing with the police. I know this kind of thing happens the world over on Christmas Eve, at least I wasn’t a little kid that got all her presents stolen.

Talking of presents, there are some really tacky Chinese lighters being sold around town. I was standing outside Leader supermarket when one of the phone card vendors said ‘Hello Missus’ and showed me his lighter with disco lights, I told him my lighter had disco lights. ‘Hello Missus’ again and showed me the built in torch, so I got my lighter out and showed him my built in torch. ‘Hello Missus’ again and he pressed down the lighter to show me the flame, so I did the same but my lighter started playing Happy Birthday at the same time! Wayne had found the musical lighters in the Dili club and was so amused by them that he bought the whole stock and preceded to annoy everyone with renditions of ‘Oh my Darling Clementine’, ‘London Bridge is falling down’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ on a loop for the next week. Not to be outdone by my musical lighter, the phone card vendor tried a final ‘Hello Missus’ and showed me a lighter with a torch that displayed a provocatively clad woman illuminated in its beam. I don’t think he quite expected the peals of laughter from me as I groped for a $1 bill, what a great tacky Christmas present.