Timor Diver

One Ton of Chooks – East Timor September 2010

2010-10-25T02:38:00.000-07:00

After 4 and a half years in East Timor I still have seen very little of it. This is mainly due to my bolt to Bali every three months to be pampered and stock up on Marks and Spencers underwear, which in fact I will need to do soon due to cheap Indonesian towels, my white knickers are now shades of mottled red and blue!

So when a friend of mine said she was going on a road trip around Timor I asked if she needed a passenger. She is the catering manager for PDL Toll and she was heading up the catering for this year’s Tour De Timor, which meant she had to visit the 4 sites where the cyclists would stay, Balibo, Suai, Ainaro and Alieu. I’d been to Balibo and Alieu before but not the other locations or the route between them. For her it was a bit of company on some long drives.

Day 1 5.30 am – It’s still dark when we arrived at the heliport and no-one else is there yet, but it doesn’t stop Cath clambering on board a fork lift truck and unloading the containers by a mixture of car headlights and my torch. By 6 some of the rest of the crew had arrived but not the forklift operator, best laid plans and all that. Only ½ an hour behind schedule and a hearty breakfast inside us we formed a convoy following the huge army Mack and the landrover with trailer that was transporting copious amounts of food, ovens and gas bottles to our first location of Balibo.

We had only got 8k out of town when the Ozzy army boys (actually the driver of the huge Mack was a girl!) pulled over for their first radio check, it was going to be a long day. Several radio checks later and never in a convenient location with a bush (well a girl has got to pee), we arrive in Balibo after taking in some gorgeous costal and mountainous scenery. Only problem was, we were the only people there, not an organiser in sight.

Half an hour or so later Tony arrives and shows us our kitchen. Well actually what he shows us is two classrooms full of miniature chairs and desks, a single light bulb (installed the day before) and wire mesh for windows. Not a problem says Cath, grabbing the first of many, many desks that we chain ganged out of there onto the playing field outside. Once the classroom was emptied and swept (a long time since that happened), the shell started to form into a kitchen, tables, cookers, BBQ, hand washing station, plus mega caterings packs of cereal, t-bags, orange juice etc.
As the chefs prepared the kitchen the rest of us prepared the living quarters, i.e. the classroom next door when the key was eventually located, more desks and chairs on the playing field forming a rather nice looking outdoor restaurant. Eventually the UN arrived with the water, the Generator arrived (as most districts have very sporadic town power) and the Portaloos arrived along with what seemed like the whole of Balibos dogs and kids, including a nasty little imp with a home-made pea shooter made from a plastic bottle neck and a piece of balloon, that had an amazing range, right into the eye of one of the Timorese helpers.

By mid afternoon the whole town was transformed, a finish line, streamers everywhere, kids clutching Tour De Timor flags and sporting t-shirts, it was all coming together, except for the garbage collection. Now if you are going to create rubbish, you must be responsible and take it with you or dispose of it properly, the organizers had planned for this but the truck hadn’t turned up on time, so where we were dumping rubbish at the back of the school turned into a rag pickers paradise. Every bag we put there was immediately raided by kids and dogs, both being very hungry. Luckily the next day the trucks disposed of the trash.

Day 2 – According to the official brochure, lunch would be served from 11 until 2 and dinner from 5 until 7. Whoever wrote the brochure obviously hadn’t ridden the grueling 126km in East Timor’s blazing heat! The first rider came in at 4hrs 11mins which is about the time it took us to drive! Many of the riders ended up on the ‘Sad Wagon’ which picks up the riders that haven’t completed the course in 8 hours. So the whole day was a production line of food with only a ½ an hour break between lunch and dinner. I found one poor guy in that break sitting dazed and confused outside the kitchen, a fruit bar revived him and stopped his shakes. The amount of energy these guys burn up and the amount of fluid they lose, one guy had to be choppered out that night due to heat stroke.

Every rider and volunteer had a wrist band which we checked when they came up for food, but what the organizers hadn’t counted on is the local volunteers coming up two or more times for food or sharing their wrist band amongst their friends, so instead of feeding 500 people at lunch we counted 850 plates!

Day 3 – Cath and the crew were up at 3am to prepare breakfast for 5am, which is the time I woke up, brushed my teeth, dismantled my tent and grabbed a cup of tea, ready to set off in the dark to Suai. Every location had Mack truck and LandRover delivering supplies the day before, so Tony had already set up the kitchen in Suai. We had to leave with the advance party to get to the next location ahead of the riders following an army escort. Setting off in the dark, Cath did a grand job keeping up with the army who seemed to treat the roads like some extreme rally race. As soon as you got out of Bobinaro the went up and up and up, twisting and turning with hairpin bends, fantastic scenery but so hard on the riders.

Ainaro was a bit more organised, the school was a bit more modern and had electricity and toilets but the kitchen was still in a classroom, as was the first aid station and the physio room. The kitchen was also helped out by some local volunteers and a great bunch of army guys including Jabber, a giant of an American who insisted on having his photo taken with two of the local female volunteers perched on each shoulder. After much giggling and shyness we got the shot.

There was also a Kiwi Padre who turned our bed camp into a holy place to say prayers with the local volunteers before bed.

Given the experience in Balibo we tried to ration the fruit and energy bars to the riders as they needed it the most, there was mountains of other food to be had and today lunch rolled into dinner without a break. So I became the fruit Nazi, much to the distain of some non rider volunteers. The sad wagon picked up even more riders today so the queue at dinner seemed to go on for miles. The first aid the physio stations were packed as the terrain was very hard and many people took a tumble.

They were not the only ones in pain, I’m used to being horizontal in water, not on my feet all day, everything was aching, what a wimp!

Day 4 – The journey seemed shorter and relatively flat compared to previous days. It didn’t seem that long before we were in Ainaro. Ainaro is a pretty little town and I had the pleasure of watching the local school band performing for the president. One thing I really have noticed travelling through the districts is how clean they are compared to Dili. The people living here may have very little in terms of running water and electricity but they have a pride in their homes, unlike Dili where rubbish is discarded from car windows at frightening regularity.

This time the kitchen and dining room were combined which had its own drawbacks especially when it bucketed it down and everyone sought refuge in the kitchen because there was no other dry space. This led to very slippery floors and people milling around in the walkways when you are trying to carry bucket loads of potato salad. I helped out in the kitchen in the morning by cracking chooks (Australian for chicken!) Whenever I didn’t do it quite right, the Timorese kitchen staff would subtly take my finished chook and correct it with a little smile.

Because we have had really weird weather this year and unseasonal downpours, the mozzy dome tents provided for the cyclists would obviously not protect them from the torrent of rain we were experiencing, so the community of Ainaro pulled together and offered verandas and rooms for the cyclists and volunteers to sleep, we ended up sleeping in the kitchen.

Day 5 – Leaving at 6am we set off for Alieu winding our way up the mountains again through incredible scenery. At the highest point of 1500ft above sea level, it seemed to level off into lush grassy plains. In the distance we could see the water station, bright red coca-cola flags billowing in the wind, offset against lush bright green hills with a crystal blue sky. We stopped and got out of the car, the chill of the mountain air, crisp in the morning with the warmth of the sun on our backs, overlooking the valleys and clouds below us with Dave Stewart instrumental playing on the car CD. It was one of life’s magic moments.

Alieu was the worst kitchen yet, it was actually the schools tiny kitchen, the only advantage to which it had a tap inside the kitchen which meant the mud floors got sodden and became slippery as hell, which is not good when you are dealing with heavy, hot buckets of chicken etc. We set the lunch tables up on the playground but soon had to move them to the verandas of the classrooms as rain was threatening again.

Now although East Timor is the land of the crocodile, in the 4 plus years I’ve been here I have (luckily) never seen one (in this country). Today was my first chance, 2 hours inland there was a 3 meter saltwater crock in a pond (with a fence around). Cath decided the adorable little thing was hungry so fed it a couple of chooks, boy crocks can really move fast when there is food around.

Today I managed to see the first of the riders cross the finish line and get to have a look around as Dean was so organized in the kitchen (plus it was so small I’d just get in the way), so I visited the local markets and took some photos. The last time I was in Alieu the whole of the main street was flooded.

I also took some photos of ‘The Guru’, a local eccentric that decided to bless us all with his rosary beads and bible while trying to snaffle some food under his multiple layers of colorful but filthy clothing.

I was the pasta Nazi that evening as we had a bit of a repeat of Balibo, many more mouths to feed than were originally estimated. Buy 8pm things were starting to run out, plenty of meat but veg was getting low so we rationed the pasta for veggies only. One particular non rider vegetarian had been bugging the hell out of us for the last 5 days with his incessant whining about vegetarian food. Every meal there had been plenty of salad, bread, potato salad, eggs for breakfast, veg and veggy pasta in the evening, no-one went hungry and any leftover food was given to the local community. However, every lunchtime he would always come in late and say ‘Can I possibly trouble you for some eggs as we vegetarians need our protein you know’, to which Cath would always answer ‘Of course you may, like I said before you just have to ask and we would be happy to cook you some eggs’. Bear in mind this guy was not a rider so was expending very little energy apart from making himself a pain in the arse. Of course it was just gone 8 pm when this guy rocked up for his veggy food, and thank goodness I had been pasta Nazi otherwise I would have got it in the ear from him. As he got his food a colleague of mine said ‘You know what mate you are a w****r! You have been giving us shit for the last 5 days, now take your f*****g food and eat it! ‘ The guy looked shell shocked, but it made us all laugh and wish we had said it ourselves. I mean come on, you’re in a country that struggles for drinking water, meat is an absolute luxury that you may get once a month, there are kids running around with yellow streaks in their hair due to malnutrition, and you are worried about 5 days without an egg! Pompus arse.

The last supper over we sat down with a well earned beer and did the calculations, over 5 days, 3 meals a day, over 7500 plates of food were served. One ton of chicken was served, imagine going through a ton of chooks!

That night the fog came in and you could hardly see a couple of meters in front of you, chilly as well. My bed for the night was the car, which I think was the best night’s sleep I had all week.
Day 6 – Cath didn’t fancy the off road style driving following the army through the fog, so we packed up after breakfast, watched the medal ceremony from the previous day (delayed because of the rain the day before) and actually managed to see the start of the final leg of the race.

A slow journey down as we were following the riders, but a pretty one never the less. Finally getting into Dili all the roads were closed, but we managed to sneak through the back way. I was relieved to get home as I had run out of clean clothes, only managed a cats lick that morning due to the cold and my brain doesn’t seem to like squat toilets, the bunged up feeling was getting a little uncomfortable. So seeing my own hot shower and western style loo was bliss.
My first ‘holiday’ since February, wasn’t really a holiday but it was great fun and experience and a wonderful way to see some of this extremely beautiful country. And well done to all the riders.

Fried Kitten - East Timor 23rd May 2010

2010-05-23T01:08:00.000-07:00

I haven’t updated this blog for a long time, but recent funny events have inspired me to. Because we are always saying.....Only in Timor.

Every day something breaks, sometimes multiple things break, it’s a fact of life out here. Sometimes they can be simple things such as the cheap Chinese plastic toilet plunger (you can’t buy quality, so you buy in bulk!) to very complex and expensive things like the compressor.
Well this year has been a marathon of things breaking. I’m not allowed to go on holiday because I’m jinxed. Every time I go on holiday something major breaks the very next day. The Jan 09 trip to Bali, we had a lightning strike that blew up the office laptop. September’s trip to Bali ended up with a wrecked Landcruiser. And Dim’s parting words to me when I set off for Perth in April was ‘What can go wrong?’ the very next day the boat sunk!

So I no longer get surprised when something gets broken, it only irritates me when I get told ‘Already broken long time’, because that’s the time you really need the item in question. Anyway yesterday was no exception; the first broken thing was the minibus.

Unfortunately, having a busy restaurant above us invites the families of stray cats to hang out near the bins. The kittens are cute when they are tiny but soon grow up into pests. However being a soppy animal lover I would never harm them. The weather has been cooler at night due to the amazing torrents of rain we have been having. So as animals do, little kitten sought out warmth and nestled into the engine of the minibus unbeknown to us.

Of course in the morning Antonio moved the minibus a few foot before the noise made him stop. All I could see of little kitty was a tiny tail hanging down out of the bottom of the car. It took about 2 hours before they could get it out and then I was asked for 20c so they could give it a decent burial. Unfortunately it then took another 2 hours to get the 2 fan belts back on. Poor kitty definitely didn’t have 9 lives.

Yesterday the rain was horrendous, we have been having huge downpours daily for the last couple of weeks, but yesterday we had two downpours. One of the units had been flooded recently so Greg and I donned swimming togs and ran round to assist only to find the swimming pool was brimming. We couldn’t drain it as the tank for the overflow was already overflowing. There was only one thing for it, jump in the pool with buckets and bail it out. That was until one bright spark bystander suggested we siphoned it off with the pool cleaner hose, much easier and quicker.

Other amusing ditties that have happened in East Timor recently is the new immigration Laws(?) You can no longer get a visa on arrival at the border with Indonesia. The only way you can get a visa on arrival is to fly in because the consulates in Kupang and Bali can’t issue visas. However some tourists were getting through on a 7 day visa while others were turned away completely. One of our tourists coming from Italy flew into Kupang, then had to fly to Bali and then to Dili as he didn’t want to waste the time and risk being turned away. Another tourist was stuck here because of the volcanic ash in Europe. Still, there are worse places to be.

Now the ports authority is another thing. We were expecting a shipment of mattresses from Indonesia. Our man that can went to get the container on the Thursday but the port was having a power cut and the backup generator could not power their computers, so they couldn’t release the container. Same thing on Friday. Then it’s the weekend and they don’t work on the weekend. Monday the National Police decided due to traffic problems that the container trucks could not go on the road until after 6pm. Unfortunately the Ports Authority finish work at 5pm. So again no containers were moving and boats were backing up unable to unload. Eventually after a huge fight between the Police and the Ports Authority, containers started to move again. We eventually got our shipment a week later. One poor bugger was in the same situation as us and the Ports Authority tried to charge him for storage!

Well the only things that have broken today is the wires on the water fountain shorted and the light over the BBQ has broken and the waterproof coating we put on the truck has disintegrated, but it is only 5pm......what next?

Bureaucracy gone mad – East Timor June 5th 2009

2009-06-10T05:37:00.000-07:00

In a previous life back in the UK, I used to sell software to government bodies and departments. One of the strap lines for the product I sold was ‘Business Process Reengineering’, in other words, look at all the manual inefficient processes, weed out the redundant ones and automate the rest, the paperless office. This never completely happened of course because government being government still needed rubber stamps and paperwork, but it went a long way to streamline the processes and make the department more efficient.

Part of the sales process was to analyse the existing processes and try and understand why it took 4 departments, 2 sign offs and a minimum of 6 weeks just to pay an invoice, then come up with an automated solution that would achieve the same thing in a week. Never in all the years of doing this did I suggest taking a match to the existing paperwork and completely starting again, until I got to East Timor!

A month ago Zelia our office assistant said Antonio has had a car accident. After establishing that he wasn’t hurt and where the accident was, I set off with the car registration documents, my driving licence, $100 and Zelia in tow.

The accident was just around the corner and already the UNPol were there (a lovely Philippine cop that I had taught to dive two years before). A Portuguese woman had run up the back of our Ute and caved the back tray in whilst completely demolishing the front of her car, obviously going too fast to stop in time. The woman’s husband, a Timorese cop, had arrived in his car and as we departed for the police station the woman managed to smash into his car too!

At the police station I discovered that Antonio had lost his driving licence and in fact the one he had had was Indonesian not Timorese. The woman also had no driving licence so they were both issued fines. With the fine in hand I took Antonio down to the ministry of transport to pay it and get Antonio a new application for a driving licence but discovered the ministry was closed. As is common here, most places have a 2 hours lunch break, but this place takes even more. The opening hours are 9-11.45 then 2-3.30, and if you want to apply for driving licence then you can only do that in the morning.

So we returned at 2pm to pay the fine. After queuing at the main window for some time we were told to go to building 40. Now these buildings as such are portacabins with very tiny numbers on them, where the officials inside (like many govt departments worldwide) have one person serving at the window and the rest playing patience on their computers. I know because I accidently went in the door and saw the screens rather than stand on a bit of breezeblock at the window as I was supposed to do.

They gave us a new document and told us to go to the photocopy window, where I had to get two copies at 10c a copy, which was a pleasant surprise as last time when I tried to register one of our cars, it was 8 copies. Then back to building 40, and then back to the original window to hopefully pay. But, no, the police administrator had written the case number down as our car registration number so of course it was back to the police station!

Registration number typexed and rewritten we went back to the ministry of transport at 3.20. By 3.45 and several windows later we managed to pay but it looked like our Mitsubishi Ute was registered as a 10 person microlet. Back to the police station and I realised that we have two Mitsubishi’s and the police assistant had written down the details and registration of our Pajero which didn’t match with the Ute, and of course the police assistant had by then gone home. Finally I managed to convince the policeman in charge that it was a mistake and we had actually paid the fine. I got the call at nine thirty a.m. and finally walked out of the police station at four thirty p.m.!

Meanwhile back to Antonio’s driving licence. The next day in the morning, he returned to the ministry only to be told they had run out of forms! The day after he got a form and was told he needed a medical at Dili hospital. So, he went to Dili hospital and was told they only do medicals on Tuesday mornings, so the next Tuesday he went to the hospital for his medical, the results of which could only be collected the next Tuesday! The next Tuesday he managed to pick up the results but only in the afternoon which meant the test centre was closed. On Thursday the 28th he finally took his test and was told he could pick up his licence on the 12th of June! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Crazy! So I’m still down one driver.

Many things are lost in translation, even though you think that something has been translated, it doesn’t actually mean it is understood. Rita our cook normally buys this processed plastic Kraft cheese which is horrible, so I asked her to buy Australian Black and Gold cheddar which at least has some taste, I even drew the packet. What she came back with was Kraft cheese and two packets of frozen chips. Huh!!!!

As Rita only works Saturday morning and not on Sunday we found we sometimes ran out of the basic essentials on a weekend, milk, bread, loo roll etc. So I devised a system for Rita to check the minimum levels 3 times a week and if we fell below those levels she was to buy more. After a couple of weeks of trialling I realised that something wasn’t understood so I tried explaining it again. Thinking we had finally cracked it, Rita came proudly back from shopping yesterday. I had to hug her because we are now owners of no less than 6 boxes of cornflakes that were not even on the list! We are going to be eating cornflakes for months!

Names are another stumbling block; I often come back from diving and find messages in the book from people I have never heard of. It’s usually a misspelling of the name and I can work it out, but the name Nim puzzled me. On phoning the number I found it was one of our regular clients, Ian! Now we call him Nim as a nickname.

Nafy joined as an office assistant a few months ago. On a Saturday she finishes at 5, so to give me a hint she subtly puts the cash box on the counter for me to lock away. One Saturday she did this just as I came in the shop followed by 20 US Navy, whose average height was over 6ft. At which point she put the cashbox back, stood up, looked up and grinned, as the top of her head would only be mid chest level on these guys. We spent the next hour grabbing as many L and XL boots and Fins as we could find and delivering them to a barrage of ‘Thank you Mamm!’, ‘Size 12 Mamm!’ and ‘I need a bigger size Mamm!’ When the shop finally emptied we sat back and giggled. I think Nafy had severe neck ache the next day.

Our pool is all but finished, just the paving around it needs to be done, but it’s filled and awesome. It’s 3 meters deep, which is fantastic for dive training and of course it’s just out the back and can be used at night as its lit inside. We spent the first couple of evenings partying in the pool, it’s so nice. Today is the first day it’s going to be used for students and we are going to have an opening party at the end of the month, should be fun!

1 the new 18 – East Timor 22nd January 2009

2009-01-28T18:50:00.002-08:00

Me and a couple of other colleagues were given an invitation to Antonio’s nephews 1st birthday party. We were given the invitation around 11am for the evening party starting at 7pm, so I thought it was probably an afterthought gesture. With this in mind I thought I’d go along with a present, smile my way through an hour of birthday cake and screaming tots, then make a hasty retreat........WRONG!

Apparently the 1st birthday is as important as we treat the 18th birthday, probably because there is such high infant mortality here. We arrived a little late about 7.45 and of course Carlos and I were the only Malai. There were chairs lined up everywhere and the guests just kept coming and coming. As soon as you thought the party was full, more chairs would be put out and more guests arrive. That’s the logic behind the last minute invitation; if you sent the invitation out too early then you wouldn’t be able to cope with the numbers!

As part of the Birthday Boys present I had bought shoes and socks for a one year old. I wish I had brought them for a 3 year old as the pile of presents was so high it would have been more useful to buy him something he would grow into.

Most of the parties I go to, as soon as you walk in you are offered a drink. This doesn’t happen with Timorese parties, you go in and greet the hosts, then you sit in rows until most of the guests have arrived, this was about 9.30, so some guests had been sitting there for 2 ½ hours! Then the speeches start, including the local policeman asking the boys not to get drunk and cause trouble with the girls, then the cake cutting, then finally the food was served. Once one person got up to eat it was like a stampede to the food table. At that point you were offered water and a choice of a beer or a soft drink. As I was driving I opted for a soft drink which upset the drinks server a bit, because he was almost insistent that I had beer. I suppose because beer is more expensive, he couldn’t understand why a Malai wouldn’t want it.

After dinner the dancing started, if you can imagine a very stiff waltz holding your partner at least a foot away from you, that’s how the Timorese dance. As soon the music stops they almost run away from each other back to their seats at opposite ends of the room. One little girl did make Zelia and I laugh though. She was about 2 ½ and her brother must have been 6, she was insistent she was going to dance with him, so her chubby little arm was wrapped around his legs gripping on to the bum seat of his trousers almost pulling them down and every time he tried to untangle himself she would increase her grip hanging on for dear life.

Carlos and I had only planned to be there for an hour, but when ’Achy Breaky Heart’ started playing I could take no more. I feigned a knee injury that prevented me from dancing and I had to work in the morning. We finally got home at 11pm, the party ended at 6am!

Talking of parties, I went to a friends Xmas party where he dressed up as Santa. Many of his local Timorese community were there and even the women had a drink. He had to teach them how to drink as they were knocking back wine as if it was orange juice. The next day he got a phone call from three of them saying they had to go to the hospital because they were very sick. He had to convince them that they didn’t need the hospital, they were just nursing their first ever hangover!

Christmas day was a bit more of a western affair. We did one dive in the morning where I finished the last dive of an Open Water Course, so my student was qualified on Christmas Day. Then we took our guests to join Tony and his friends on the beach where they had set up a great shaded structure and a big BBQ. Chilling out on a white sandy beach in the tropics on Christmas Day can’t be bad.

New Year I spent in Bali, in the cooler climate of Ubud with friends. On the 2nd I treated myself to a half day spa, a chakra massage where they dribble hot oil all over you, a very strange experience. This was followed by a body scrub and a flower bath. The nicest thing about the place was the setting; each room had a huge open window which overlooked lush greenery. As you relax in your bath surrounded by frangipanis, you feel the cool breeze from the window and watch geckos running along the sill.

Merpati Madness – East Timor 12th December 2008

2008-12-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

We have 3 airlines that fly into East Timor: Air North from Darwin who gives you a ridiculously small luggage allowance for a ridiculously high airfare. Austasia who have recently started a route from Singapore which opens up that market, but also some Europeans who are banned from flying on any Indonesian airlines because of their bad safety record. And finally Merpati to Bali, who are Indonesia’s domestic carrier but charge an international price.

This is soon to change as East Timor is setting up their own airline to fly to Darwin and Bali, which should stop the monopoly. But at the moment you have one airline depending on your destination.

The Merpati experience is one to be endured rather than enjoyed. Every 3 months the price seems to increase, but you don’t have a choice if you want to get to Bali. The flight is functional, you certainly don’t expect any frills, and if there is anything edible in the stone cold lunchbox they give you, it’s a surprise. It’s even more of a surprise if they manage to give you customs card on the plane, unfortunately they were the wrong ones and we had to repeat the form filling process again when arriving in Dili.

Because my working week is more weekend intensive I tend to fly weekdays, so have never encountered the mass exodus on a long weekend. Last weekend was a public holiday so the Merpati flight was full, or should I say overbooked by 10 people. Rather than addressing this at check-in, they waited until everyone was in the departure lounge which is not a pleasant place, with ineffectual air conditioning which had broken completely that day, gross toilets and no water available to buy (plenty of gin and whisky though). After 2 hours Merpati basically told their customers that they were overbooked and had to ‘cull’ themselves! You can imagine how this went down!

Eventually 10 people did give up their seats and the remaining passengers were herded towards the plane only to find their luggage had been unloaded, apparently the plane was too heavy. So one hundred people protested on the runway. This is supposed to be an International Airport!

I’m not sure how it all got resolved but the plane landed in Bali 4 hours late minus some poor sods luggage, and most of the passengers who had connecting flights of course had missed them. So the Customer Service award East Timor style has to go to Merpati this year.

Last week the Dive Centre gained PADI 5 Star status which we were all really pleased about and celebrated with a few bottles of fizzy plonk. To get 5 star status you need to satisfy certain criteria in continuing education, reef conservation and also have a generally nice dive centre with changing facilities, retail shop etc. In the lead up to our application the place had a distinct feel of building site at times, a new storeroom was built, the old storeroom was turned into a toilet and shower and just when we thought the rubble, cement and noise had finished, my boss decided we needed a huge wall sized water feature with our logo on it. It does look fab now it’s finished though.

This water feature is becoming a bit of a mystery though. First the pump worked intermittently which meant we had stagnant water which is breeding ground for mosquitoes. A couple of scientists who were doing research on dengue fever confirmed that we had the dengue larva in the water. An easy remedy is to put fish in the water that eat the larva, so Megan came round with some fish for us. The very next day the fish had disappeared.

We worked out the problem with the pump, due to a slow leak, the water level dropped and the pump works on water pressure, so by topping up the water, the pump works and gone is our dengue problem as the water is always moving. Two days ago one of my UNPOL customers presented me with a present of a terrapin that he had found in a puddle in the middle of the main road. So we stuck the strangely named terrapin, Felicity, into the pond at the bottom of the water feature and an upturned shell so she could sunbathe and hide under it. The next day the terrapin had disappeared!

This morning, John showed me a bucket of fish he had bought to put into the pond, these were more of the dengue larva eating type. This afternoon I returned after lunch and the fish were gone! Now I know we have a lot of stray cats round here but this is getting ridiculous.

We also had another visitor a few days ago, I turned around to see Rita shooing a huge crab through the house with a dustpan and brush, it made me giggle as it kept changing direction causing Rita to run around in circles.

Another mystery occurred on Tuesday when I walked into the office and found one of the security cameras facing the wall. We installed CCTV after the traditional method of the Lulic Man didn’t identify the thief and we decided a more modern approach may be needed. As the camera facing the wall was very suspicious, the whole nights footage was played, nothing at all went on until 8 a.m. when on screen came Zelia with her feather duster and knocked the camera round. Mystery solved.

We have already got into the Christmas spirit here; on the 2nd of December I gave Zelia a long list of shopping, paint, vinegar, pens, toilet roll and a Christmas tree. I was worth it just to see her face light up, she was so excited. I returned back in the afternoon to be presented with a garish, over decorated, multicoloured plastic tree, but the staff like it and that’s all that counts. So we are suitably decorated for our Xmas party and 5 Star celebration on the 16th. Although attendance may be a bit low as everyone is dropping like flies here due to a horrible stomach bug that’s going around. It lingers on and on and the weight loss in people has been dramatic.

There has been a big clean up around town getting rid of the market stalls. The stalls were illegal and in some cases like the Pertamina market, a bit of a safety issue as people would park on a bend to use the market. Apparently the only stalls that are allowed outside official market places are those that are on wheels as they are considered vehicles. So now the vendors have to go back to the official market places if they want to trade. The place looks completely different.

East Timor had a big quake last week 6.3 and the bed moved for me again. I’m getting used to it now.

We have had a load of tourists in recently, real genuine ones that have come here solely to dive, not visa runs or visiting relatives. We had a couple from Holland who were both instructors and had been diving for 27 years and only had enough time to dive for one day here. In all the years of diving, neither had seen a dugong in the water. On their second dive my friendly dugong playmate from a couple of months ago came back to the same spot and repeated his playtime for 10 minutes. It must like visiting instructors.

We have also had loads of squid spawning and a few humpback whales. Although the rain has come early this year and the visibility is dropping. Time to teach search and recovery and navigation courses again.

Splash for Trash – East Timor 8th October 2008

2008-10-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

On the 20th of September it was International Beach Clean Up day. All over the world volunteers were picking up rubbish from their beaches. So to join in the spirit of things I decided that our dive centre was going to take part and if possible get as many kids involved as I could.

The event was a great success. We held it at the Ocean View Hotel as we needed shade and toilet facilities. 50 people took part including some regular divers, snorkelers and kids from both international schools here in Dili. We managed to get some Timorese teenagers involved as well. They were at the hotel for an English lesson and when they had finished I invited them to join us. They thought it was a great idea and donned their rubber gloves and joined in with the rest of us.

What I didn’t know was the Portuguese television company that was filming the event was going to show the footage worldwide. So I’m now an international film star, even the USA! We managed to collect 48 big bags of rubbish in two hours which were disposed of by Anteater (thank you!) Prizes were given to the kids that collected the most unusual pieces of trash which were a car bumper, a radio and a welding helmet.

I had my first encounter with a Lulik man (witch doctor) recently. We had a robbery at the office and to eliminate any suspicion the traditional Timorese way of doing things is to visit the Lulik man and he will tell you who did it. A load of codswallop you may say but the Timorese are very superstitious and really believe in this stuff.

So I went to see the Lulik man who told me who the culprit was. He did this by wadding his mouth with betel nut and lime, and then every time we asked a question he would remove this muck from his mouth, inspect it and give us the answer. The thing is about betel nut is it a mild drug, so the guy was getting stoned and looking into his drugs for the answer!

I then had to go and buy a candle and all the staff had to hold the candle and swear that they did not steal anything and they didn’t know who did. The weird thing was when I took the candle back it sent shivers down my spine and I had goose bumps for a good 5 minutes. Once the ceremony was over I had to return the candle to the lulik man and tell him what kind of curse I wanted. Anything from death to disability! I opted for a head cold. Needless to say his description did not fit any one person and no-one has got sick. This is not something I want to repeat, ever!

We have had a whole band of tourists in from Australia, 10 of them! Wow we had a busy week, just the logistics alone. But I did some incredible diving over on Atauro, the walls there are amazing. The Timorese polices have been having a clamp down on car registrations, If you don’t have the original documents on you then the car gets impounded. The tourists were driving around in a minibus we hired and of course got stopped at a road block, bye-bye minibus!

Now this is typical of Dili. The major car hire company had two partners who fell out so they split and are now both trading in separate premises but under the same name. I phoned the company to get the papers for the minibus only to be told that the previous company illegally kept all the papers for the cars and they are now in the middle of a court battle to get the papers back. This doesn’t really help when your hire car has been impounded by the police! We managed to get the minibus back though.

I did a deep dive course this weekend with 3 of my regular customers. The course is 3 dives and each one of them was fabulous. The first at Dili Rock we got 26 nudibranches in an orgy plus a winged pipefish (well spotted Annabella!) The third at Marble Rock we had a Bumphead Parrotfish and 2 leaf scorpionfish. But the second dive at K41 was one of my best dives there yet. At 40metres we had 2 white tip reef shark just laying on the sand, when they moved off an huge Napoleon Wrasse swam past. Then a huge barracuda, 21 squid doing a fabulous line dance, a flying gurnard, 2 lionfish, a scorpionfish, a swiftly moving nudibranch and a flatworm. To top it all we had a manicure courtesy of the cleaner shrimp.

We have some guys over here that are trying to raise a shipwreck in the harbour. They are a great bunch and we have been trying to help them out with their unexpected problems. So they invited us on their boat for dinner. It was bliss sitting on the top deck in the cool night breeze looking over Dili. Really chilled out especially as I am in the middle of a very stressful course with 6 Filipino cops who cannot seem to make it on time, ever! I did get a word of warning though, when using the toilet, check the area first. They had a banded sea snake in there, eek!

Stop, Sink, Act – East Timor August 18th 2008

2008-08-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

Accents are funny things, after living in East Timor for 2 ½ years, I sometimes get mistaken for an Australian. However I love to tease my German colleague about his English pronunciation. I was sitting in the office listening to a dive briefing when the instructor asked ‘What do you do when you have a problem underwater on a night dive? One of his German students replied ‘You Stop, Sink and then Act’, which had me laugh wery wery much!

I took a group of guys out diving from the Mercy ship recently. The Mercy is a huge naval hospital ship that visits East Timor every year. They tour around South East Asia, but East Timor is the only country they visit on an annual basis. The ship is huge and is fully fitted out with operating theatres, opticians, dentists and specialists, unfortunately though, no recompression chamber. The work they do is amazing; one of the guys was telling me about kids horribly disfigured with cleft palates getting their smiles back with a relatively simple operation. Another kid was burned in a fire seven years before and his skin on his legs was fused so for seven years he could not walk. After an operation he was bicycling around the decks of the ship!
After the first dive, the lads produced their own lunch in the form of a ration pack complete with its own cooker! It’s a plastic bag containing magnesium, just add water and you have your very own boil in the bag cooker, really impressed me and Edu (One of my local staff). Can you imagine the concept of creating heat without a flame or electricity?

This weekend has been fabulous; we had a white tip reef shark at Dili Rock which was totally oblivious to our presence. It was being cleaned by a fish and getting annoyed with it so every couple of minutes it would circle around then settle back on the sand again, not aware of us, what a display.

My next dive was with an Advanced Open Water student doing her navigation dive. Half way through the timed task my watch stopped. Then trying to navigate a reciprocal heading she was going completely the wrong way, I then realised she had her compass upside down. Finally navigating a square I realised geometry was not her strong point (even though we had practiced on land) as the compass headings she had plotted were 60 degrees not 90, we both have never laughed so much underwater.

And Sunday; Sunday was the second best dive I’ve ever done in my life. We had a fab first dive at behau village, baby cuttlefish, nudibranches, crayfish and blue spotted stingray. But the second dive at Secret Garden was absolutely incredible.

We had already seen white tip reef shark, blue spotted sting ray, maori wrasse and bumphead parrotfish and were just coming up to our safety stop. I was freezing! It was the 2nd dive of the day and I was teaching photography and diving with an instructor tourist and his rescue girlfriend so the dive was very slow and 26 degrees in the water.

I heard a noise and the instructor was pointing above me, I looked up to see a huge dugong swimming over me about a metre above my head! He then swam round all 4 of us and checked us out, so close that you were tempted to put your hand out and touch it (of course we didn’t though)

Then he took off to a sandy patch and rubbed and rolled himself in the sand wiping out the vis completely so we lost sight of him. Not to worry, he was in a playful mood, he came around and checked us all out again, then off again to rub his tummy. This routine went on for 15 minutes until my buddy and I decided that we were numb, we had been in the water for 67mins by then. So we left the other buddy pair to enjoy a few more minutes of the playful frolicking.

Luckily 2 of the divers had cameras so got some fantastic shots really close, but my buddy was so cold she could actually show the other divers her photos as her hands were shaking so much! It was so worth it though.

Photos by Vincent -Thank you

My only dive to beat this was the same scenario but with a 5m baby whale shark in Egypt!

Our new Divemaster says she wants to come diving with me as I seem to be on a lucky streak at the moment. For the 3rd day running I’ve seen something great, yesterday it was an Eagle Ray at Christoe Rae. Let’s see what today’s diving holds.....

Electrical, Mechanical and Physical – East Timor 20th July 2008

2008-07-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

Since I started my new job on the 1st of July, I’ve been plagued with breakdowns. So much so in the first few weeks I thought someone might have put a Lulik curse on me! First it was the cars. Prior to East Timor I’d only ever had one flat tyre, then one in the two plus years I’ve been in East Timor. In the first two weeks I got two flat tyres, one on each car! Then it was the batteries on both cars. Of course I was immediately asked if I had left the headlights on, I may be blonde but I’m not that dizzy! So now I’ve learnt all about batteries, alternators and glow rods (well enough to know when they break they are expensive and inconvenient!) Then I got a phone call from my colleague asking if I could send out the other car with a long tow rope as he had sunk the Land Cruiser!

I also went through a spate of accidents that kept me out of the water for a while. I think in five years of teaching I’ve had three days where I couldn’t teach due to illness. That was until a few weeks ago when I was doing a rescue course and whilst exiting the water carrying my own gear plus two others, my foot went down a hole and when a wave came, I went one way and my foot stayed in the same position, ouch! Luckily it was a bad sprain rather than a break. However, me being me, I don’t do ill, so the next weekend I thought I’d be ok to dive if I put my gear on in the water. So when a large wave came and I was dragged back out as I was holding on to my equipment. The sea literally spat me out straight into a rock and I bashed up my elbow.

Normally cuts and bruises wouldn’t be a problem providing you douse them heavily with Betadine, as in the tropics cuts can so easy get infected. However, if you are constantly in salt water it has a cleansing effect, constantly opening and cleaning the wound. So my predive preparations included strapping my elbow up with cling film and sticky tape as you can’t get proper waterproof dressings here!

I was on the mend when Mark, Pedro and Tania had their birthday party. Fuelled by Sangria; silliness ensued including jumping over the bonfire on the beach. Following several successful jumpers I managed to roll on my bad foot and went down heavily on my leg. I nursed a lovely bruise the next day as wet sand is pretty hard.

Finally, to add insult to injury (to coin a phrase), I was doing Open Water skills on the sandy bottom at Dili Rock. I felt a sharp pain in the same foot but couldn’t see what had bitten or stung me. By the time I got out of the water my foot was swelling up and turning a lovely red colour. Driving back to the Dive Centre I was finding it hard to breathe, swallowing was difficult which really started to worry me. For the first time since I started my scuba career I actually used my insurance to call DAN (Divers Alert Network) and spoke to a great doctor. Hence for the next hour I had to sit with my foot in a bucket of extremely hot water, much to the amusement of the staff.

Just when I thought the curse had lifted, the compressor buggered itself! Luckily we have two! So I spent the last few days in Bali getting a simple ‘O’ Ring changed on a filter. I had to go to Bali anyway as my quarterly Marks and Spencer’s shopping run was due. But trying to explain this weird looking mechanical device in your hand luggage to customs officers was slightly trying.

Still for all the lumps, bumps and bruises you get in this profession, it’s still worth it when you get a diver squealing with delight through his regulator after his first dive and telling you that ‘I’ll never forget my first dive, and I’ll never forget you’. Especially when he is from a land locked country such as Nepal.

On a final note, the diving here is great, but the place is quirky. We were kitting up to dive at Tasi Tolu when a Blackhawk started to take off behind us. Of course all dive preparations stopped as we watched the show, those things are impressive.

Medical Mayhem – East Timor 18th June 2008

2008-06-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

At the age of 12 I joined St John’s Ambulance, it was a compromise with my stepmother, if I did something useful, then I could go to the youth club afterwards. So after an hour of dressing fake wounds and creating perfect roller bandages, I would share a coca-cola with my wanna-be skinhead mates at the local Holy Family church youth club.

In my teenage years, however, St John’s proved very useful; you could get to see bands free. Ok, you had to wear a very embarrassing uniform and you were always at the back, but you got guaranteed entrance.

As a diving instructor I teach EFR (Emergency First Response) which is not much different from the St John’s of years ago, simulated situations, plastic dummies and fake pain. Until last Saturday I’d never actually had to use my training in a real emergency, and I hope with all my heart, I never have to again.

In East Timor, crash helmets are supposed to be mandatory, but it’s a complete farce. You often see thin plastic crash helmets rolling down the street where they have come off because the rider has not done the strap up. In a climate such as East Timor, crash helmets are pretty hot but young lads also want to be ‘seen’ on a motorbike because they are still luxury items, most people can’t afford one. That’s why you often see a family of five on one motorbike, and if you are lucky the main rider only has a crash helmet perched on his head. The local Dili motorbike riders also have a habit of removing the mirrors on the motorbike, because it looks ‘cool’ which creates a traffic culture of merge and swerve. As a car driver, the slower the better as you never know what’s going to pull out on you.

On Saturday I was in the Hotel Timor pool teaching a rescue course when we suddenly heard a sickening screech then crunch. It took a couple of seconds to register but then I was out of the pool and in the street as fast as my legs would carry me. One of our Divemaster Trainees was already ahead of me. We emerged to find two young lads only about 16 or 17 lying in the street both with serious head injuries. One apparently was wearing one of these cheap plastic crash helmets that came off immediately upon impact, the other wasn’t wearing one at all.

It does not matter how much training you have had, nothing prepares you for reality. There was absolutely nothing I could do except keep the head still and check for breathing, they were so badly injured that you just were willing the ambulance to arrive, I felt so helpless. There was an Australian army guy there that was amazing, he packed and dressed one of the guys head. It was the second major traffic incident involving a motorbike that he had dealt with in a month. But what really got me was the onlookers, I know it happens in every country, but fellow Timorese taking photographs of a guy that’s lost 2 pints of blood on the street really sickened me.

The first ambulance arrived after 20 minutes but it seemed like hours. They had no neck brace but at least they had a back board, the second ambulance didn’t even have that. Seeing the two young lads off in the ambulance you knew there was nothing you could do for them and their chances of survival were slim to zero. On Monday evening I found out there as a shrine laid out on the road, one the boys had died, just after his sixteenth birthday.

What an absolute crazy waste of life! That lad were someone’s son, brother or nephew. It costs $30 to buy a full face padded helmet here, ok, it may not be up to Australian or UK standards but at least it gives some chance of survival. The attitude here seems to be that crash helmets are worn to avoid a fine, but the education doesn’t extend to the fact that mandatory crash helmet wearing is there to save lives. One of the guys I used to work with cut a star shape in the top of his helmet for ventilation because it was ‘too hot’. If he had come off of his motorbike the sharp plastic edged would have impaled in his skull but that was a risk he was willing to take even though he actually owned a full face padded helmet.

$30 however, out here is a lot of money. On the average wage of $2 per day, that’s half a month’s salary but the loss of a loved one is a hell of a price to pay.

Later in the week I had my own experience of Timorese medical care. While teaching the same rescue course, I got my foot stuck in a hole between rocks. At the time I was carrying a lot of equipment, so when the wave came, my foot stayed where it was and the rest of my body went sideways, spraining the foot badly. After two days of hobbling around I went to see the Portuguese doctor who wanted me to get an x-ray to ensure there wasn’t a fracture.

There are only two places in Dili where non military/UN folk can get an x-ray. One is clinic that’s open from 12 until 2 and the other is Dili National Hospital with its one tired x-ray machine and its single only operator. The hospital itself is under construction, so there are planks over walkways which were hard to navigate with a painful strapped up foot, let alone a wheelchair!

After locating the X-Ray department whose walls are adorned with ‘DANGER RADIATION’ posters, I gave in my doctor’s letter and was told I had to pay, which I expected. What I didn’t expect is payment has to be made in the Laboratory which is two buildings away. So off I hobbled only to find the entrance I had been told to go to was closed for construction, so I hobbled back the way I came and tried a different way. Once I got to the lab a friend of mine who worked there took pity on me and led me through the maze of corridors to the payment section, I’d never had found it on my own.

Back at the x-ray department there were around 60 people in the waiting room. Here you see the poverty of the country, young mums with faded, ill fitting clothes, mosquito scarred legs, carrying their stick thin sick children in sarongs tied around their neck. The whole hospital looks tired, antiquated equipment, grubby walls and posters stuck up with yellowing sticky tape. The renovated blocks look good though and according to the doctor it is so much better than a few weeks ago when the IDP’s were still living there. Then you had tents between every building, with cooking fires and livestock tethered at the entrance of the operating room and Intensive Care Ward, not a hygienic environment for a hospital. I’m glad I don’t get sick very often.

Luckily my foot wasn’t broken, only sprained, so I’m going to be careful where I put my feet in the future, I’d rather not repeat this experience.

Mr Timor – East Timor 27th May 2008

2008-05-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

Forget American Pop Idol, forget the Eurovision Song Contest, the biggest extravaganza of the year was Mr Timor! Seven (very brave) luscious men, strutting their stuff in front of 300 screaming women (and men!) at the Atlantic Grill on Saturday night. Apart from a few Dili hitches such as power cuts, the night flowed as easily as the Bintang did. Even the wimpy men that didn’t have the guts to enter got Dutch courage after a couple of beverages and did an impromptu strip and strut. The winner of the evening was a gorgeous Timorese boxer, with an amazing physique much to Lisa’s luck as she was the winner of the raffle, first prize, a date with Mr. Timor. All the money raised goes to promoting HIV prevention and awareness in East Timor, so a great cause as well as a fantastic night.

I love menus in Asia, they are a constant source of amusement for the spelling mistake and Dili is no exception. In the Dili Club you can get unchooies on your pizza, at the Saigon you can order Sweetcorn and Crap meat soup, but still nothing could top the old Filipino restaurant that used to offer Chicken Crispy Skin and Ass (no spelling mistake there!)

I’ve just finished teaching the kids at one of the International Schools about Project AWARE and Reef Conservation. The ages ranged from 8 to 12 and boy do they have imaginations, they ask intelligent questions too like ‘How do they dynamite fish? Because if you lit the fuse and threw it in the water, the fuse would go out’. We played great games like pin the fins on the fish and measuring a blue whale and over 5 weeks we built a mural of the reef in East Timor, I’ve never seen quite as many whales and dolphins in one place, but their artistic talents are amazing.

Talking of artistic talents I actually picked up a pencil and completed a drawing last week for the first time since I left school. I sat in on an art class at Arte Morris, the kids there put me to shame, and they are so talented, picking up shading and perspective so easily (credit to the teacher of course). It’s a great organisation and some of the art they produce is stunning. They have a new exhibition in Hotel Timor for Independence Day, so I’m going to have a look this afternoon.

Unfortunately, I was working on Independence Day, so missed the parade which was reported as fantastic, I also missed the fireworks because they were moved from 8.30 at Jesus to 7.30 at the Palace. Still by the sounds of the vibe it was much more of a celebration than the last two years, may be now as things are settling down here there is more reason to celebrate.

Return of Ramos – East Timor 1st May 2008

2008-05-13T04:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been playing international jet setter; well, Indonesia and Singapore! I took a well needed holiday in Bali and really pampered myself. I’d received a wonderful birthday present of a massage in Bali at one of the top reputed spas which was wonderful. Then through a friend I met a lady called Jenny who runs a spa school in Bali and she asked Camilla and me if we would like to be guinea pigs for her graduates. Of course Camilla and I jumped at the chance and had an aromatherapy massage one day and a full body scrub another day which was a bit strange because they scrub you with a turmeric mixture then plaster you with yoghurt. I felt like an Indian takeaway.

Meanwhile, back in East Timor, Ramos Horta returned home from his hospital stint in Darwin to a reception of thousands of teary eyed supporters on the streets. The road to his house (outside which he was shot) was completely repaired and resurfaced in a matter of days prior to his arrival. This is a pretty amazing feat in East Timor given the state of most of the roads in the city, and the road was renamed April the 17th Avenue, marking the day of his return.

The coverage from Australia Network showed Ramos Horta visiting the medical facility that acted so quickly evacuating him when he was shot. Ramos Horta thanked some of the Australian troops that were on duty that day, they shook his hand and said ‘That’s ok Sir’, whereas when Ramos thanked the Timorese staff, there were hugs all round and not a dry eye in the house.

A few days after his return the curfew was lifted except in one area where Salsinha was still in hiding. He has since given himself up, exactly two years since the crisis started in April 2006.

Meanwhile, I flew to Singapore to attend the Asia Dive Expo. The East Timorese Government had a stand there and I was representing one of the dive companies. The show wasn’t huge but the number of people that attended kept you busy all day. It’s been a long time since I’ve done an exhibition and forgotten how much your back and feet kill you, that and the fact you feel like a parrot saying the same thing a thousand times over. Still, if it boosts the tourism industry in East Timor it will be great.

I haven’t been to Singapore for years, even the airport is impressive. The hall for immigration alone is bigger than Dili International airport. Within half an hour we had got through customs, changed money, bought a SIM card, booked a hotel and got our luggage. In contrast to Dili International which in fairness, has seen the return of the little café, so at least you can now buy water. Upon entry to the airport terminal you are faced with a sign that reads ‘All weapons are to be inspected and cleared with the magazine removed prior to entering this terminal’, there is even a diagram with a picture of a machine gun and the correct way to unload the magazine! At check in the luggage is moved by hand, the waiting room is hot and sticky with ineffectual air conditioning units and you walk to the plane in the blazing sun. But with two flights a day, you hardly need the Singaporean efficiency.

The other thing I got used to was having the loo flushed for me. As soon as your derriere leaves the seat in Singapore, the automatic flush kicks in, I got back to Bali and was waiting for the toilet to flush itself. Similarly with the taps, I stood with my hand under the tap in Bali and realized I had to turn the tap on myself! How soon we get used to things.

Taxis were another source of fascination to me, smart, leather upholstered cars with Sat Nav, credit card swipe facilities and the automatic printing of receipts. A far cry from Dili taxis. However, I have seen some smart new yellow taxis on the streets of Dili and after the recent removal of the blackened windows from taxis, the absence of just a two inch strip for vision is more reassuring. A few adventurous taxis have replaced their windscreen slogans with slightly smaller ones that don’t obscure half the windscreen, so my driving amusement is starting to come back again. However a couple of new ones make me wonder if they ever want any business, there is ‘Broken’ and La Diak (which means ‘No Good’ in Tetum). Would you get in a taxi that’s advertising itself in this way? And last but not least there is a microlet sporting the banner ‘Lottery’!

Pink Wellies – East Timor 2nd April 2008

2008-05-13T04:20:00.000-07:00

Last year I was in England for Easter and the year before troubles were afoot so this year I was quite taken aback with the level of celebration Easter causes in East Timor. My first real encounter of a Dili traffic jam was Palm Sunday, thinking we were being clever we chose to go East via the Bekora route and found ourselves in what I can only compare to the Notting Hill Festival; people everywhere dressed in their finest, holding intricately woven palm leaves. One little girl caught my eye in a bright pink nylon fairy dress with matching pink wellington boots. Please, nobody light a cigarette near her! It never ceases to amaze me, the extent of synthetic fibres worn on a Sunday. In this heat, I sweat in cotton clothes, but I’m a Malai, I guess if you were born here you would be acclimatised. I get the Wellington Boots though, we have had so much rain here recently and as I live in flip-flops I’ve got a permanently soggy bum and dirty calves as the flip-flop flicks mud up your legs.

Easter Sunday we got stuck at Hera behind a procession carrying 13 crosses. The UNPol at the checkpoint cleverly diverted the traffic through a back road, unfortunately, they didn’t put anyone directing further down, so all the cars turned too soon and got stuck in a side road just before the church entrance. Not close enough to see the procession unfortunately.

The curfew has been extended again but now it’s 11pm until 5am. To me this curfew makes very little difference as I’m rarely out after 10 in the evenings, but you have to respect it. One Sunday night when the curfew was still 10pm I encountered a young woman who was completely plastered around 8pm. I stayed until 9 and advised her to get a lift home and not to drive. After I had left, she got several offers of lifts home but refused saying she was ok to drive. Of course, when the time came she couldn’t seem to get the car started (probably as she was using her house key to try and start the car), meanwhile curfew time came and went, so the UNPol turned up and asked if they could assist her by giving her a lift home. Being intoxicated as many of us know can affect you sense of reasoning, she decided to call her own security officer (her boss), slurring down the phone, way after curfew. Needless to say she had left the country by the Tuesday. What a way to get yourself sacked from an Aid Agency, call your boss and tell them you are in trouble, pissed and after curfew, doh!

When I first got to East Timor Manuel spoke very little, of any language. The strong silent type! So my communication with him resulted to a lot of pointing and gesturing. Two years later, I guess Manuel has resigned himself that my Tetum will probably never extend beyond ‘Good Morning, how are you?’ so he has been coming out with a few words in English, which not only astounds me but also his East Timorese co-workers. According to Jose and Nelson, Manuel can now count in English and he says goodbye to his colleagues with ‘See you tomorrow’, in English, which amuses them no end.

Manuel is the only one of the guys that is not a diver, he can’t swim. But he is not afraid of wading in the water to help divers out or retrieve equipment during my Rescue courses. During one of these courses I was swimming out with Jose who was playing the rescue victim. Jose said ‘Look at Mr Manuel’. Manuel was standing in the shallows with a wetsuit and mask on peering in the water. So next time I was out diving at K41 in the surface interval I put a wetsuit, fins, mask and an inflated BCD on Manuel and took him snorkelling. He swallowed a bit of water and I think he was relieved when he could put his feet down again, but he told the other guys he enjoyed it.

Continuing the lighter theme from Christmas, we have been inundated with cheap Chinese musical lighters that play the most god awful tunes that stay in your head for the rest of the day. At Landmark Supermarket today they are advertising Musical Lighters 35c, lighters with no music 50c. People would rather pay a higher price for ordinary lighters than be subjected to the tinny tunes every time they light up!

Lastly, I returned home today and my landlord told me he had fixed my water problem. Yippee! Since I moved in, water has been sporadic at best. This is mainly due to lack of town water in this area. During the day they fill the water tank so that we have water at night when the town water is at its weakest. The only problem is that I don’t have regular transport, so John used wait until he saw my car arrive and then open the water. Of course when I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have water either. This week has fluctuated between no water at all, a tiny cold trickle or such bad water pressure that you get scolded. So hopefully my water problems are fixed, but it makes me cringe to think of those villages I went through a few weeks ago relying on one small hand pump and a well for all their water needs. My water problems pale into insignificance.

Special People – East Timor 5th March 2008

2008-03-06T20:35:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity and absolute privilege to accompany an Australian woman and a Timorese guy to Same, to deliver aid to Fundation Fuan Nabilan an organisation that works with the blind and vision impaired of East Timor. There are many NGO’s in East Timor covering wide communities of people but sometimes a group will fall between the cracks, the blind are in that position. Originally this group of 15 students attended a special school in Tibesi, Dili, but in the crisis of 2006 their school was burnt down and they fled with their teacher Joanna to Same.

Unfortunately people with disabilities in East Timor are treated as outcasts, even in Same these young people get stones thrown at them. Same was an Alfredo stronghold so in the recent weeks there has been a strong military presence with low flying helicopters and APV’s (Armoured Patrol Vehicles). I know for the un-ordained hearing a black hawk overhead can set your heart racing and APV’s when they trundle past are deafening. Can you imagine how frightening these noises would be if you can’t see?

In addition to the military presence, the foundation was burgled and they lost beds, furniture and most importantly their computer which was used to produce Braille. Four girls share a thin single foam mattress on the floor; the boys have to sleep on the ground. The government is supposed to help these people but they are getting no financing and Joanna and her husband haven’t been paid for nearly two years. The aid that was given was simply to buy food.

After a 4½ journey through amazing scenery we arrived at the Foundation and were welcomed with open arms. A group of six blind young people sang us songs and played guitars then read us a speech from Braille. Since their computer was stolen the teachers have produce lessons using cards and pins, a laborious, painstaking task. It was an incredible experience, I can’t play an instrument and my vision is 20/20, yet I was listening to wonderful music produced by two young men that couldn’t imagine what a guitar looks like.

The other thing that is frustrating is that some of these young people simply have cataracts which with medical care can be removed and in some cases restore sight, but with healthy women dying in childbirth in the capital city’s hospital, eye care is a long way down on any medical agenda.

I have limited experience of humanitarian work when I volunteered at a street hospital in Calcutta, India, but my time there made me realise that some communities need help because they really can’t help themselves. Yesterday really broadened my understanding of why people are so passionate about working in this sector. Many of my customers are dedicated to the organisations that employ them because they are making a difference. What riles me is the bureaucrats and the consultants that charge thousands of dollars just to replace the word ‘Cambodia’ or ‘The Solomons’ with ‘East Timor’ on their proposals.

Soapbox speech nearly over, I don’t normally do this but the aid the Foundation received was just to buy food, not replace the Braille computer or pay for an eye operation, it was simply a stop gap. Joanna even apologised for not being able to offer us any food! These guys need long term help so if you know of any organisation that may be able to help fund this Foundation please reply to me and I’ll pass the details on to someone who can make it happen.

The journey back took about 5 hours as it was raining heavily and a passenger we were taking back to Dili was horribly car sick so we had to keep stopping. The rain was so bad that in the town of Aileu the water was knee deep in the main street. I took a photo of a water pump in the middle of a village that was the only source of water for the whole village; it makes me cringe to think I was moaning about the lack of water pressure in my flat. All I have to do is turn on a tap! Living in the city you take so many things for granted.

Tired and grubby we arrived back 12 hours from set off, but what an amazing day, one I will never forget.

Road Block Reprimand – East Timor 26th February 2008

2008-02-26T20:12:00.000-08:00

The state of siege has been extended for another month. One good thing about it is the decent night’s sleep I’ve been getting as there is no one wandering about for the dogs to bark at and no passing cars, I even overslept one morning, the first time ever in East Timor in nearly two years. Peaceful sleep unfortunately alluded me last night when I had a couple of rogue mozzies in my usually mosquito free apartment, that ravaged my elbows of all places!

The curfew up until Saturday night was eight p.m. and the problem is for the restaurant owners themselves because if you are like me, you leave the restaurant at five or ten to eight with just enough time to get home by the curfew. The restaurant owners are still clearing up and shutting up shop at curfew time because their patrons have only just left. I know of one owner who was apprehended giving a lift to his staff to ensure they got home safely, so breaking the curfew himself.

In addition to the curfew, everyone has to carry I.D. because of the ‘State of Siege’. There are also road blocks and speed checks (a very good thing!). I had to go through a road block on my way to a dive at Dili Rock today and the whole thing was farcical. Firstly you are waved at, is that waving me over or waving me through? I wasn’t sure, so I pulled over. Then 3 or 4 people pointed at me, were they asking me to move the car, or carry on? I had no idea. Eventually a Chinese UNPol sauntered over and asked me to get out of the car, which I did. I was then scanned with a metal detector by a young Timorese lad with no uniform on. At this point my student who happened to also be UNPol piped up that ‘Language Assistants are not allowed to do the scan, it must be a police officer and they should be female’ the scanner was immediately given to a young female officer who duly scanned me and my staff member but not my student. None of us had been asked for I.D.

Next the policewoman searched my bag, but no other bags or the gear bags on the back of the truck. So if there were no weapons found in one bag, that obviously meant there were no weapons anywhere else on the truck. Wrong! I realised later I was inadvertently carrying a weapon in the form of my dive knife that was packed with my gear in the back of the truck, whoops! Then I was told that the blackening film on the windows was not allowed (the reason I was driving with all the windows fully down) and proceeded to try and pick it off with her fingernails. I started to envisage a long and hot few hours at that road block until my student informed the Chinese UNPol that it wasn’t mandated to remove the blackening only recommended and we would do it later.

If my student knew all this by reading the memos and documentation that is sent round to all the UN Police Officers, then why did the Chinese UNPol allow this situation to happen? Lack of keeping himself informed, lack of understanding or lack of authority amongst his colleagues?

On the subject of keeping informed, the ex-pat community all received text messages from our various embassies on Saturday saying the curfew had been extended from 8 p.m. until 10 p.m. but will apply for another month. Unfortunately this information did not ripple down to the PNTL who apprehended a couple of girls on a motorbike returning home from work at 8.30 p.m. Scared, they phoned their boss who is a friend of mine, who went down to try and sort the situation out, taking along another friend who speaks Behasa. The PNTL boys weren’t having any of it and tried to resolve the situation with their fists. So representatives of East Timor’s National Police Force were trying to enforce an outdated restriction through ignorance, then assaulted an Australian and Indonesian National. And these guys are allowed to carry guns!

Ramos Horta is out of his coma and talking to his family which is great news.

I’ve managed a couple of dives over the past week but the temperature has dropped to what feels a freezing 26 degrees (down from the usual 28-30 degrees) and the visibility was awful. However, I took a guy out that had learnt to dive near San Francisco so he found the 10-12 metre visibility normal and the temperature was 14 degrees higher than he had been used to. He thought the dive was great, so did I because I saw my first ever blue ringed octopus.

I’ve also seen the Pope this week! Not the current one obviously. A huge statue of the previous Pope has been erected outside the new church on the hill at Tasi Tolu overlooking Dili. So we now have the Pope overlooking Dili from the West and Jesus overlooking Dili from the East. The strange thing about the Pope though is he has a huge body and a very small head.

Time gentleman please – East Timor 15th February 2008

2008-02-14T19:17:00.000-08:00

The state of emergency and subsequent curfew has been extended until the 20th of February. I popped into Fat Boys after work yesterday, the place was packed and everyone was eating. I joked with Fat Boy himself that he was getting the whole nights business in two hours and by 8 o’clock he can sit back and relax. Closer to home at the Dili Club at five to eight, it was like drinking up time in a bar in the UK, except the landlord didn’t need to call time, the government did. The only time I’ve seen a pub clear so quick is when ‘Time’ is called Christmas Day lunchtime. The journey home was eerie, not a car or person on the street.

The curfew is having a bad financial effect for many businesses such as restaurants and nightclubs that only open in the evening. The other business is Tiger Fuels, the country’s only 24 hour garage and convenience store, which is now 14 hours. Much of their business is done at night when people pop in for pizzas and petrol, or emergency supplies such toothpaste, nappies, toilet roll, water or dog food. If you get caught short now, you need to make sure it’s before 8 p.m.

Other businesses however are making a financial killing again. What with the attempted assassinations on Monday, the funeral of Alfredo yesterday and the arrival of the Australian PM Kevin Rudd today, the journalists have flocked back into Dili filling the hotels and renting all the available cars.

Whenever you ask an East Timorese ‘Where are you from?’ the answer is never Dili, this always puzzled me. I had it explained by one taxi driver recently. When the Portuguese came to East Timor, Dili was a small village, the Portuguese developed it into a port and city and the East Timorese came to Dili for work. But generations later, their loyalty is with their village or town that their family came from. For births, deaths and religious ceremonies the Dili residents return to their home towns.

Here when someone dies, their body is laid out in the family home for family and friends to pay their respects and grieve. From friends’ accounts, the women wail in grief and the whole process is very vocal, quite different from the sedate affair we are used to in the UK. Alfredo’s body was laid out in his stepfather’s house just down the road from work. I can’t imaging he would have been a pretty sight given the wounds he received. Hundreds of East Timorese were at the house to pay their respects along with a very visual display of military and police. He was buried in the garden rather than being transported back to his home town of Maubisse breaking with tradition, because it was too much of a risk to move the body with all the road blocks and security.

The city seems relatively calm but wary. The daily rain is putting a dampener on things (excuse the pun!) and the nightly curfew means that any activities on the street are highly visible. Ramos Horta in the mean time is reported to be stable which is a relief.

One thing I did notice this morning is the taxis; gone are the sun strips that cover half the windscreen, gone are the blackened out windows and the taxi drivers are driving around with their windows open. I don’t think this has anything to do with the overcast weather more to do with being visible at road blocks.

Playing Battleships Again – East Timor 12th February 2008

2008-02-11T22:16:00.000-08:00

In my new flat I have a TV, a receiver and a digi box. I have all this equipment with cables everywhere and I can only get one channel, the BBC World News! Watching my one and only channel yesterday morning I was updated about the news of Dili, but I had already been informed by the more reliable Dili grapevine. The president Jose Ramos Horta had been shot and was in a critical condition being treated in Darwin, the assassins also tried to shoot the Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, but he was unharmed and the leader of the rebels Alfredo was shot and killed.

Needless to say we were advised to restrict movements around town and there is a curfew for the next couple of days between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. The new PM of Australia, Kevin Rudd sent over a load more troops after a request from Xanana and declaring a state of emergency. So at the moment we have HMAS Perth strutting its stuff just off the waters of Dili, the waters of which at the moment are terrible with all the rain we have been having. It’s a feeling of Déjà Vu, we were having the same weather when the first battleship appeared in May 2006.

Obviously with such shocking news, people are worried about the repercussions, but it seems that Ramos Horta is pulling through and the International Security Force is trying to round up the remaining rebels. Without their leader, let’s hope that that faction will lose momentum. Apart from that, the city seems calm.

In other news, the rations given to the IDP’s has been halved, trying to persuade them to their homes. It was feared that there could have been a backlash but I’ve heard no reports of any troubles at the camps.

But the best snippet of this week is a European delegation that were invited to attend a meeting in East Timor’s capital, Dili. They were a little concerned when no-one was waiting for them at the airport, the telephone numbers they had been given didn’t work and no-one at the airport seemed to know anything about their arrival. It’s probably because they were waiting at Delhi airport, India!

No Drunking Bar!– East Timor 25th January 2008

2008-01-29T20:00:00.000-08:00

There are more and more Malais around town with the UN and NGOs’s, which creates a higher demand for cars, accommodation and unfortunately, prostitutes. There also seems to be more IDP’s especially around the harbour area, so much so that they are camped out on the slipway causing problems for anyone trying to get their boat in and out of the water. The Harbour View cafe should be renamed the IDP View cafe because that’s all you can see.

So why are there increases in the IDP’s? There are a few reasons; one, some people cannot move home because other people have moved into their homes. Two, the government is offering payouts for the IDP’s to move, but you have to be an IDP in the first place to get the money. Three, which is the most concerning, is if you move out to an IDP camp, you get free water, free rice and in some cases electricity and satellite TV and you can rent your house out to a Malai for $1000 per month. Given that the average wage is $2 per day, even if you have 3 members of the family working you would still make a 455% profit, a bit of a no brainer!

In a recent clampdown around 100 prostitutes and pimps were arrested and are now sitting in jail awaiting deportation. It’s mainly Chinese girls that come in on tourist visas. Several bars have been closed down including one that proudly announces it is a ‘No Drunking Bar’. You can’t get a drink but you can buy a girl.

In East Timor if you are looking prosperous (i.e. a bit porky) it’s a good thing, it means you can afford to eat. Whereas if you are looking dark, it’s a bad thing as fair is beautiful. I was talking to a New Zealand cop and on the same day we had both been insulted. I was looking for a bicycle as mine had been nicked on Xmas Eve. $200 was out of my price range so I asked to see bikes around the $70-$100 price range. I was shown one without gears, but I was advised by the shop assistant not to buy it because, quote ‘In two weeks it will break because your body is so big!’ Similarly the NZ cop was told after returning from holiday, by one of the waitresses at the Espalanda ‘Manna (sister) your skin is so black! Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

Crash helmets are supposed to be compulsory, but unfortunately you get a family of five on a moped but only the driver is wearing a helmet and usually they are the thin plastic helmets that don’t come anywhere near to the safety helmets required for skateboarding in the US. I saw the classic today; a motorcyclist had a helmet which had split, so he had fixed it with bright yellow cable ties. Unfortunately, he had not trimmed the cable ties so his helmet looked like he had a bright yellow Mohican.

I’ve found a semi reliable taxi driver to take me to work. Most taxi drivers in Dili must develop back problems as they black out their windscreen so far down that they have to stoop to see out of it. Manuel is no exception, he’s not only got blacked out windows, but he’s got about 8 inches of unadulterated windscreen to peer out of. The difference with Manuel is he doesn’t have a huge woofer in the back of his cab, so you are not tortured with over loud Indo music and only hearing the base. Manuel plays West Life and has Air Conditioning. One of his first comments to me was ‘My Taxi is my God’, given that most Timorese taxis don’t sound like they are going to make it to your destination, I’ve decided to give Manuel a go.

We have had so much rain recently that most people are coming down with either stomach problems or mosquito related diseases. Touch wood, I’ve managed to avoid both. The weather though doesn’t do much for business; however it’s a great time to do rescue courses. The worse the conditions, the better the course. Some days, after heavy downpours of rain, it’s like diving in England, but without the cold. There is one advantage of poor visibility though; you can get much closer to the fish. Dili Rock on Thursday I had an amazing dive.

Taxi Terror – East Timor 26th December 2007

2007-12-26T22:24:00.001-08:00

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.

3 T-Shirts in one day – East Timor 14th December 2007

2007-12-14T05:43:00.000-08:00

Since my last update I had a glorious 10 day holiday in Bali. My friend John came over from the UK and he had never been to Asia before, which makes you look at a place with a fresh pair of eyes. We certainly did Bali, after a couple of nights in Sanur with some crazy hard drinking New Zealanders for company; we hired a car and toured the island, after the compulsory shopping trip to Marks and Spencer’s of course! First stop was Lovina to go dolphin watching at dawn, then onto hot springs and massage. Next stop Lake Batur visiting some temples en-route and sometimes almost having to physically fight your way back to the car; it’s hard to close the car door when there is an arm stuck in it wielding a fistful of postcards! God some of those souvenir ladies can be very insistent.

After watching the sunrise over the lake from the hotel, we moved on to Ubud, which bears no resemblance to the Ubud I visited 20 years ago. It’s charming, and the hotel we found was also charming with carved 4 poster beds, lush greenery around the swimming pool which backed on to bright green rice fields. Incredible at only $30 per night. In Ubud we went to see traditional Balinese dancing which was more like an opera, followed by fire dancing. The next night we watched live jazz at the Jazz cafe. Then on to Amed for the amazing rice terraces and a night in Candidasa. Templed out and weary we returned to Sanur to have our spirits a little dampened by the unscrupulous money changers. If you see a really good rate, beware; always make sure that you are last person to count the money as the good ones count the money again and suddenly you walk away 200,000rp short (about $22). If you insist on counting it again they suddenly come up with a story about commission and a lower rate as they know they are not going to get away with the fast hand trick. Another thing you have to watch is mixing up the 5,000 note with the 50,000; John bought some tobacco for 55,000 which the guy behind the counter was happily counting. Luckily I noticed that John had in fact given him 550,000, if I hadn’t spotted it, that transaction would have cost him $60.

I know cheating and corruption goes on all around the world, but in Indonesia it seems rife. When the police pull you over, even if you have done nothing wrong, you know it’s going to cost you 50,000 and you get the money ready, the sooner you pay them, the sooner you can be on your way. East Timor is not perfect either; at the border you should pay $30 for a 30 day visa, but many tourists are told that they can only have a 15 day visa. Correct me if I’m wrong but if a 30 day visa is $30, shouldn’t a 15 day visa be $15, but they are still charged $30 for it. So what happens to the extra $15?

Talking of visas, whenever I get my passport photos taken in the Fuji shop, they always come out washed out and over exposed. I worked out that this is done on purpose as the Timorese consider light skin beautiful, so the cameraman makes his clients paler and attractive. Unfortunately, he doesn’t change the settings so all the Malai come out looking like ghosts.

Having visitors from Europe means you can request the odd items you can’t get in East Timor. Between John and Kasia (a recent visitor from Poland), I received shampoo and a DVD, other people received Cheesy Wotsits , Slivovitz, beef suet, guitar strings and flea collars (the collars were not a personal present, obviously!). I sometimes get puzzled responses when I reply to the question, ‘Is there anything you want me to bring?’

Nearly every day since I returned from Bali we have had one or more electricity cuts per day and the place is so hot! It seems much hotter than last year, but it’s just the humidity is greater. Stand outside for a couple of minutes and you have sweat trickling down you, not pleasant. Days are judged by the number of T-shirts you wear and just recently they have all been 3 t-shirt days. It’s not good when you find your own smell offensive. On the plus side though, on one dive the water temperature registered 30 degrees.

The electricity cuts are so frequent that none of the traffic lights are working as it would be too tedious to try and reset them every time the power goes off. Guess what? There is no major chaos, the traffic is still moving just like it did before the traffic lights were installed six months ago. The taxis and horrendous one-way system around Dili ensure that nothing moves too fast, allowing traffic to merge when it needs to. That was the only good thing that happened at the beginning of the crisis, the one-way system was scrapped, only to be reinstated by the Ozzy troops when they arrived.

One bargain I have found to help in the dark is a Timor Leste lighter at 50 cents. It has 3 light sources; the flame itself, a set of disco lights which are set off as soon as you click the lighter (much to my amusement), and a small built in torch with a great beam that you can use to light your way to the generator.

On November the 12th it was Remembrance Day for the Santa Cruz massacre. Candles were lit and lined the street and beach, our local village made a bonfire on the beach, played guitars and set off fireworks, except some of the fireworks were actually flares. The poor dogs were petrified. The trial of the guys that shot the policemen last May was held last week, sentences ranged from 10 to 12 years with 7 acquittals. 12 years doesn’t seem a long sentence for murder.

We are seeing more and more turtle shells for sale. Usually out in the sticks at the side of the road. Turtles, coral and some shells are protected species in East Timor, carry a $50,000 fine or up to 5 years in jail for anyone caught buying or selling them. Not that would make any difference to the Timorese because they couldn’t imagine $50,000 in their wildest dreams. They just know that the Malai will pay $20-$30 per turtle shell and they and their family can eat well. The stupid thing is that both flights out of East Timor go to countries where these products are illegal also, so whoever is buying them stands a great chance of getting them confiscated anyway.

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

2007-10-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-15T00:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Me and my Shadow – East Timor 22nd September 2007

2007-09-25T02:54:00.001-07:00

I’ve just had the most delightful bunch of Phillipeno cops to teach this week. Five of them wanted to do the Open Water course ‘together’. They are like that, they like doing things in groups and taking copious amounts of photographs while doing it. The banter between them was hilarious, they would tease each other endlessly about being late, getting something wrong or forgetting something. I only impose beer fines for tanks standing up and left alone and wearing the mask on top of your head when you are in the water. These guys thought it was a great way to get beers out of each other and started making up their own Heineken and Tiger fines. On the fourth day I congratulated them for not being caught in a beer fine (if I don’t see it, it doesn’t count!) On the last day, in between dives, the group were posing for photos again when one of them came up to me and grassed his colleagues up, by pointing out two upright, unattended tanks! At that, I bellowed at the top of my voice ‘Beeeeeeer Fine!’ To which the whole group exploded in a fit of laughter.

It’s amazing what you perceive as normal and what you get used to. Now camouflage and low flying helicopters are normal everyday things here as is seeing the army and police carrying guns on the street. I was watching a film one night with a friend who is a NZ UNPol, when a colleague of his knocked on the door. He grumbled that it was his private time as he answered the door, then was given a gun as the colleague was going on leave. I commented that it was hardly something you could leave at the hotel reception for collection, a gun with live ammunition.

I was teaching another student who was firmly grasping a bum bag throughout the lesson. As we prepared to go to the pool, he nodded to the bum bag and asked if he could lock it up somewhere. ‘What’s in it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, just a couple of glocks’ was the reply. Obviously they were not waterproof! In my previous employment on resorts I would be asked ‘Where can I lock up my camera and wallet?’ Here I get asked ‘Where can I lock up my gun?’ Bizarre!

Everything seems to have calmed down, the security tree alerts are getting rarer and there is a sense of normality on the streets (again, define what’s normal!) It feels more like it did when I first arrived in February last year. There are still trouble spots around the IDP camps and certain areas that you just avoid, but that is true of any capital city. A few weeks ago we had a spectacular lunar eclipse. The moon looked like a big hot air balloon lit up in the sky. The whole city was noisy; all the local people were banging poles to warn off the evil spirits (not the UNPol are coming). I hadn’t heard noise like that since my first earthquake here last March.

The new government are already making themselves very visible by fixing up the pavement and roads. It seems like it’s everywhere in the city all at the same time, which means it will all need repairing at the same time. However, it will be nice to walk down the beach road (or any road come to that!) without the fear of breaking an ankle on a pothole. They have even painted white lines on the road all the way out to Metinaro. That was weird when I first saw it, as previous to that, the only white line in the 40K stretch marked an unofficial race track.

I have a shadow called Doris. It seems everywhere I go Doris follows me. She is a very social little dog and is known by all the locals by both her official name and her nickname ‘Fatty’. We have a new bar next door called ‘Fat Boys’, which should actually be called ‘Fat Boys & Doris’, because she frequents it more than we do. And if the patrons keep feeding her, she is going to be a very fat girl, hopefully too fat to escape through the bars of the gate as she does at the moment. Having a bar next door is great, especially for students at lunchtime. The menu is basic, burgers and club sandwiches, but it is expanding, but so are our waistlines and the portions are huge. That’s why Doris gets such rich pickings.

Back to my shadow, the other day she followed my all the way to the Beach Cafe, which meant I had to get a take-away (too many people for her to scrounge from!) Then a hunky NZ Cop pulled up and offered me a lift home, of course I had no chance as the only thing Doris associates with cars is the vet! She comes with me to the Esplanada, whether it be to the pool or the upstairs restaurant, she even sits outside the toilets in reception when I get changed. Yesterday, I had to drop my laptop off at one of the rooms, so she followed me up the stairs. The rooms have glass sliding doors which need to be kept shut when the air con is on, so I slid the door closed as I set up the laptop. Doris sat on the balcony, staring at me through the glass and wagging her tail, adorable! I thought kids were supposed to cramp your style, not dogs!

The horrible windy weather has calmed down, thank god, because we are busier than ever on the diving front. Even my local training reef, Dili Rock, on one dive last week yielded a weedy pipefish, a 1½m white tip reef shark, a giant moray being cleaned by three shrimp and a clouded moray eel (which I have never seen before). It’s also coming into whale season again and one of our friends spotted the first humpback only 100m off of shore. The only down side is the water temperature is still down at 26 degrees, whereas normally it’s 28 degrees, so after an hour I’m really cold. I’m resisting going back to my 5mm long wetsuit though as I get heatstroke just putting the thing on.

Baptism under fire – East Timor 28th August 2007

2007-09-06T02:15:00.000-07:00

Things are starting to calm as the troublemakers went a bit too far in Baucau. They raped an 8 year old girl and attacked the Bishops house. It smacks of the terror of the Indonesian times. So Fretlin could no longer be seen to support this level of violence and their campaign is losing steam. Evidence of this was the mass two day demonstrations last week, only 50 demonstrators turned up!

During the days when the security alerts were pinging every 5 minutes, we found ourselves without divers, which is unheard of on a Sunday afternoon. Taking advantage of this rare occurrence, we went to the Ocean View for a drink by the sea. En-route we stopped and watched a most amazing baptism, the sea was incredibly rough and the clergymen, all suited and booted, were finding it difficult to keep upright in the waves. There were a group of Timorese singing I guess equivalent to hymns, while each child, dressed in white robes, would enter the waves into the hands of the clergymen to be dunked. It was an incredible sight, especially in the midst of all the trouble around town. Life and faith go on.

To get to the best dive sites we need to go through a place called Metinaro, which is where the biggest IDP camp of 6,000 people is situated, right next to the Metinaro Barracks. On Thursday its market day in Metinaro town and trouble flared up between the residents of the IDP camp and the residents of the town, which took the UNPol all day to calm down. Apparently over 20 houses were burnt down over a football match! This means that the travel restrictions for the UN are not lifted, so we are Dili bound again this weekend.

The barracks have a large firing range behind them and last week the local army decided to carry out target practice. They told the UN, but unfortunately the message didn’t filter down to the 6,000 residents of the IDP camp living less than a mile away. Can you imagine the terror of those people hearing the mass gunfire so close when the country is as unstable as it is? Doh!
Talking of Metinaro Barracks, a friend had to go and see the dentist there, the day after the IDP/Town trouble. He sailed through, all was calm again. In the Barrack itself they have 3 resident crocodiles. One very large male about 4 meters long, a large female and a smaller female who has to be kept separate because the other two keep attacking her. Can you imagine a 4 meter long croc? Terrifying! As they approached the cage the male croc made a loud guttural noise and opened his mouth against the bars. One of the guys noticed one tooth was protruding sideways and hanging out, so he levered the tooth out with his car key. The croc then grunted and ambled away. The guy is insane, I’ve seen the tooth which is as big as my little finger, this is an 4 meter crocodile we are talking about!

A few weeks ago, we were going out diving and just past Rubbish Ridge I saw a familiar face. I turned to Wayne and said ‘That looked like Ross Kemp’. It was; he was here to film a documentary on gang wars which I had actually seen advertised when I was back in the UK. So when Caroline (Irish) said to me yesterday, ‘I know this sounds bizarre, but I’m sure I saw Phil Mitchell in Castaways a few weeks ago’, I could confirm that she wasn’t seeing things. From Easterners to East Timor, watch out for the episode. (UK viewers only!)

We have had a few tourists in town over the past couple of weeks. The local hangout for budget travellers is Backpackers, run by a guy called Henry who is another local character. He met Jim (a Brit tourist) after a couple of days and the first thing he said to him was ‘What! Don’t they have newspapers in your country then?’ Amazingly one night, we had 6 Brits around one table and it wasn’t even Pancake Day at the British Embassy.

Although we were restricted to Dili, the weekend was great. The boys set up a marquee on Dili Rock beach and we had a big BBQ with about 20 people, divers, snorkelers and some just hungry lunchers. It was a great social day. On the diving front I also did a couple of Bubble Makers this week which are always good fun, but this time the kids were Timorese. We reckon that we have the youngest ever Timorese on scuba at 9 years old and a girl at that.

Here we go again! – East Timor 11th August 2007

2007-08-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

East Timor has a new Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao (not a surprise!) There were a few problems leading up to the announcement, which we expected. Monday, I was trying to be a tourist and replace some of the photos that I lost when my hard drive crashed. I’d picked the worst day for it, as it was overcast and threatening rain, not great for photos. My phone started pinging at an alarming rate with security text messages; avoid this area, disturbances in that area, it seemed that all over town there were rock fights, burning tyres and unofficial road blocks. I’d been all over Dili that day and seen absolutely nothing; it’s really a case of being caught at the wrong place at the wrong time because as soon as the UNPol get there, the show is over.

At the time of the mass texts, I was at the Casbar for sundowners, probably one of the furthest places I could be from Bebonuk where I’m house sitting. Prompting Robbie we finished our drinks as I didn’t want to drive around town in the dark. The boys are less discriminating at night; luckily I wasn’t driving a white car that could be mistaken for UN, but still I didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. As we left the Casbar we could see smoke rising over Dili so I dropped Robbie off and picked a route that avoided all the usual hotspots such as the IDP camp in front of Hotel Timor. Driving through Colmera I found the source of the fire, flames licking out of the top of the customs building. The rest of the route home was trouble free although sitting on the porch that night I could hear gunfire in Comoro and at 1am there were 4 UNPol cars outside the house.

The next day in Bebonuk there was evidence of the previous night’s events, the remains of smouldering tyres on the road but for the rest of the day it seemed calm, except they set fire to the Customs building again and really finished it off this time. We are wondering if this wasn’t a strategic move to get rid of any evidence of dodgy deals over the last 7 years! I phoned Tony to find out if the new handle for the car had arrived, he assured me that it had arrived on Monday, but no-one could find it as the paperwork had gone up in flames, in the Customs House!

Wednesday, I left the house to go to work as the UNPol were apprehending a few local lads. The phone pinged again ‘Reported disturbances at Bebonuk Primary School’, already too late, the show was over. By Thursday I was diving at Dili Rock, no problems at the airport which had previously been shut. Although there were a few UNPol around as Rogerio Lobato, who was jailed for 7½ years in 2006, was grounded on a plane awaiting the OK to take off, apparently to receive treatment for heart problems. There were reports of trouble brewing in some of the districts including Metinaro, so diving in the East was out.

By Friday I was diving at K41 as Metinaro was fine, the incidents were now reported further East in Baucau and Viqueque. I had been teaching a wonderful lady who was here visiting her daughter (what a week to come!). Unfortunately, her daughters’ workload had increased due to the problems and the only thing Mum had seen was the house and the Dive Centre, so I showed her what a beautiful country this is once you get outside of Dili. In the afternoon I played tour guide, stopping at the basket village, the Tais Market and a couple of souvenir shops. Boy does this lady know how to shop! It was good fun.

Wayne is playing reporter again, so the dive truck is now a press truck. He’s gone off to Baucau which is the latest trouble hotspot along with Viqueque where combined, reportedly 120 buildings have been burnt and in Baucau an UNPol car that was escorting an NGO was attacked with guns and the vehicles torched. However, no-one has been able to get into Viqueque including the press, so any reports of trouble are unconfirmed.

As for Dili, its business as usual, people on the streets, chicken vendors firing up their BBQ’s, market stalls open. The only thing that’s been affected is the diving as the UN has put a ban on travel to the districts. So I guess its Dili Rock again!

Love Is.......................70 Buffalo – East Timor 30th July 2007

2007-08-01T02:02:00.000-07:00

Nelson is a very handsome, intelligent, single Timorese guy, who earns a good wage by Timorese standards. However, should he wish to marry, the dowry would eat up his savings and any potential earnings for the next few years at least. Nelson comes from Bacau and there the dowry price for a girl is 10 buffalo. At $300 a piece, that’s a hefty sum of $3,000, especially when you consider that the average labourers wage in East Timor is a mere $2 a day. Now, if Nelson aspired to marry a girl from LosPalos (considered the most beautiful girls in East Timor) then it would set him back 70 buffalo! $21,000! Let’s hope he falls in love with a local Bacau girl, much more affordable, although at the moment he’s set his sights on a new motorbike.

Although East Timor is staunchly catholic for the majority of the population (the island of Atuaro is mostly protestant), some non catholic values are accepted, probably because of the dowry. If a couple can’t afford the dowry, they live together and if the girl gets pregnant, the dowry price comes down. Strange that contraception is a no-no because it is against the church, but sex before marriage is ok, figure that one out!

Getting back to the LosPalos girls, they are considered the most beautiful because of their fairer skin. I found the same thing in Egypt, the supermarkets stock all of these ‘Whitening’ beauty products to bleach the skin. The paler the girls skin is, the more beautiful she is considered, whereas in Europe you find bronzing products and fake tan and we clamour to get ourselves a tan to look healthy.

We have just had our busiest 3 weeks since I have been in East Timor, we even had a couple of genuine tourists! Unfortunately, someone upset the wind god and the sea has been the roughest I’ve seen it. On one dive we saw Wayne and his group literally surf back into shore. They had spent five minutes working their way out to the dive entrance only for one huge wave to take them straight back to where they started. Wayne said it was the biggest wave he had seen in the 7 years he’s been here. I attempted a dive at Dili Rock one afternoon, only to be spat out 3 times, much to the amusement of Manuel, who started giggling as if to say ‘Are you going to give up now?’ I did as my legs won’t take many more cuts and bruises. There is something to be said for struggling into a long suit.

I surfaced from a night dive at Dili Rock to see the shore ablaze with red and blue flashing lights, there were three or four UNPol cars with their lights on. While we were on the dive, Jose had been attacked by 3 guys with knives. Luckily Jose is a savvy kid and made a run for the PNTL headquarters where he managed to telephone Wayne, who then raised the alarm to UNPol. Thank god Jose got away with no more than a scratch and wasn’t seriously hurt. Luckily, I had told everyone to leave their valuables at the dive centre so the only things stolen were my bag, $40 from one customer and a pair of shoes from another. The Malaysian UNPol questioned me as I was shivering in my wetsuit (I couldn’t change as they had stolen my clothes!) and asked me to list the things stolen. It’s not until later you remember everything, but the main things were my phone, a compass, $20, keys and my clothes. The UNPol thanked me and asked if I had a phone number, ‘Yes’ I replied, ‘But they stole it!’. He sheepishly grinned and apologised for the stupid question.

About 10 minutes after we returned to the dive centre, the UNPol turned up saying they had apprehended 2 guys fitting the description and would like Jose to identify them. So as Jose couldn’t be identified, Wayne dressed him in one of his T-Shirts (about 5 times too big for Jose) and his straw hat; he looked very stylish. Sure enough one of the guys apprehended did attack Jose, but no sign of the stolen goods, which included, we remembered later, a full first aid kit. Let’s hope that that was put to some use.

We had to go and file a report today at the UNMIT HQ. A rather tedious affair as the girl detailing the incident could only type with one finger and some things like an Oceanic Wrist Compass don’t translate easily into Tetum. I amused myself by trying to identify all the different nationalities of police working there who all have different uniforms. Apart from Timorese, there were cops from Portugal, Uruguay, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Nigeria, Gambia, New Zealand and Australia. I guess that‘s why they are called the United Nations Police!

The microlets and taxis are displaying a new batch of windscreen stickers, which is a good sign as last year everyone was keeping their head down trying to be inconspicuous. It’s refreshing to see this trend appearing again, as it means that things are relaxing. Joe and I were giggling our way back from Dili Rock making up sentences from the windscreen stickers, a new type of car game. The best one we came up with was ‘O’M’GOD’ ‘SHEILA’, it’s a ‘TRADGEDY’’ HONEY’! Other stickers of note are Tomboy, White Zombie and Rick. But still my favourite so far is O’m’God.

There has been very little trouble over the elections, the occasional security tree alert about the usual areas and one rumour about the attempted assassination of the Liberal party leader with a bomb that failed to explode. However, you never know with these rumours, they have a tendency to take on a life of their own and get embellished with each reiteration. The Fretlin party won the majority, but it will be a coalition government and at the moment they are trying to decide who will be Prime Minister. The deadline for that decision is tomorrow, and then if no decision is made, Ramos Horta, the President will appoint someone. This could cause a few problems, as someone, somewhere, will not be happy with his decision.

I’m house sitting in an area called Bebonuk which is nearer the airport than the dive centre. An Air North plane passed overhead as I was sitting in the garden and I found myself wincing at the noise. It was at that point I reflected that I used to live 7 miles from Europe’s busiest airport, where flights used to go over my house every two minutes from 5a.m. onwards. When Concorde went over, you would have to stop conversation as you couldn’t hear yourself speak. I was wincing at the maximum of 2 scheduled flights a day and the occasional low flying helicopter. Time for a reality check!

John Howard paid Dili a visit, a kind of morale boost mission for the Ozzy troops. He then went on to Bali to open an eye hospital. I missed the concert in Dili as I flew to Bali the day before him and then got stuck in a traffic jam as he and his entourage sped past the day he left. Talk about a police escort, it took a good 5 minutes for all the cars and motorbikes to pass. I spent a few days in Bali, but this time it wasn’t quite as great. I think it’s because I’ve been house sitting prior to the trip in a really nice house, so I wasn’t clamouring to get away from it all quite as much as I would normally after 3 months in Dili. Still the break was nice; I had a shopping trip to the new Central shopping centre in Kuta, where I bought T-Shirts from Marks & Spencer’s! Plus my usual full body scrub and massage and upon Ann’s recommendation, a cream bath, where they lather up conditioner on your head and give you a most amazing head, neck and shoulder massage, bliss!

Saying that, there are loads of new massage parlours opening in Dili, one called ‘Cozy’ is so popular, you have to book an appointment weeks in advance. At least the presence of UN is helping the local economy in that way, unlike the PX. I can’t understand why the UN has a facility to buy booze at duty free prices, when alcohol is readily available in shops and restaurants around town. The UN are given the perk of cut price alcohol (for what?) when they could be boosting the local economy. I’d understand it more if the mission was in a Muslim country in the middle of nowhere, but the capital city of East Timor with its bars and restaurants is a far cry from somewhere like Afghanistan.

Love Is - East Timor 28th June 2007

2007-06-30T16:28:00.000-07:00

Love is bringing two 2ltr bottles of fresh water and heating them in the sun while your boyfriend goes diving. Then standing on the back of the car and pouring the water over his head, so that he washes the salt from his hair. I thought this was so sweet, it reminded me of those ‘Love Is’ cartoons you used to get in the Daily Mail.

Back in February this year there was spate of rice raids around town. Well to prevent a reoccurrence, rice is now transported with a police escort; one car at the front, then three rice trucks, then another police car. The rice trucks themselves are so overloaded, they look extremely precarious. On the way to lunch I commented that the police car at the back was only there to pick up stray bags if they fall off. On the way back from lunch, that’s exactly what happened! The UN Policeman was hauling the stray bags into the back of his truck causing an enormous traffic jam.

At the start of the crisis last year, one vigilant Timorese labourer was digging a trench outside the centre for the new water pipes. He was even doing this when the shots started! However, the trench was then abandoned until September when the new pipes were finally put in. It’s now June and one of the pipes up the road has sprung a leak, causing a swamp and water flooding into the road. But the Timorese being an inventive lot have turned the water source into an impromptu car wash for taxis, as the water is pretty clean. That would just never happen back home.

Everyone has different memories and experiences of the last year. For the new batch of New Zealand cops staying in the Esplanada, the situation is a picnic compared to what their predecessors faced. However, they are still getting to grips with what the conflict is all about. They had to break up a 300 strong stone fight. Was it politically motivated? Was it an East/West thing? Was it a gang fight? No it was the result of a Karaoke competition!

I dived with one of the cops last week on Pertamina jetty, only to surface and be faced with a gun wielding FDTL officer and his cronies. Apparently, diving on the jetty is a security risk as I may be a terrorist like the Bali bombers. I explained that I was diving with a policeman and showed him photos of fish on my camera, but it didn’t cut it. Luckily the Minister for fisheries popped in the dive centre the next day, so hopefully we will soon get our nearest dive site back.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally visited the cemetery at Santa Cruz. This was the place that on the 12th of November 1991, the Indonesian military opened fire on a peaceful demonstration killing over 200 Timorese. The Indonesian government admitted killing 19, then upped it to 51, but every report I’ve read, states around 200 were killed. There is no memorial there, but the place is so packed with graves it’s hard to walk around. Many of the graves are tiny as infant deaths here are high. The graves are all shapes and sizes, many of them tombs, colourfully adorned with pictures, statues and flowers.

You would think that after all this tiny country endured under the Indonesian occupation and how hard that they fought for independence, that the nation could live in harmony, united by their history. Unfortunately this is not the case. I saw some of the footage of the massacre of the 11 unarmed policemen last May. It was horrific. Being here at the time, I remember the day, but didn’t see the footage that went out to the world. The photos I saw wouldn’t have been broadcast either because they were too gory. There is only so much blood that the public can endure on national television. For months after there were stones blocking the road like an unofficial memorial, a no-go zone. Now there is an official memorial with 11 headstones of those that were killed and a large inscription honouring them for dying serving their country.

A few nights ago there was a shooting incident where the FDTL fired warning shots in the air to break up a crowd. Normally warning shots would be one or two, but this was around 30 shots. What the FDTL haven’t grasped is the law of gravity, what goes up must come down and unfortunately they came down a bit too close to the Australian troops who returned fire. Luckily I haven’t heard of any fatalities from this incident.

It’s now a few days until the election and the atmosphere around town is becoming tense, you can feel it. Political rallies are taking place and there are UNPol everywhere. The GNR have screamed past with sirens blaring several times today, and we have seen several lorry loads of Fretilin supporters driving into town as it’s their rally today. One lorry just went past and got stoned by our local boys. Two minutes later, all the Kiwi cops from the Esplanada were out on the street in flak jackets, but not before my two Norwegian neighbours dressed only in bath towels. That made me laugh more than anything.

'Used to be.....' - East Timor 6th May 2007

2007-06-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

All is quiet at the moment, however there has been shooting near Viqueque and a hand grenade went off in Fatuhada. I hope it’s a one off incident and they are not upping the ante. Until now the weapons of choice have been stones and ambon arrows. That’s probably why there is such a low death toll. Don’t get me wrong, any death in a conflict is a needless waste of life, but considering how long the unrest has been going on here; the death toll is very low in comparison to other countries in similar circumstances.

The whole place seems so different from a year ago; a sense of normality is starting to come back, although the IDP camps seem to be a permanent fixture. The huge camp at Metinaro Barracks now seems to be a living, breathing town, complete with shops, restaurants and according to rumour, two brothels.

A year ago Xanana had just declared a ‘State of Emergency’ and I saw my first Ozzy foot patrols. It was a state of emergency, people were running in droves to the hills or IDP camps as their houses were being burned down, the supermarkets had been closed for nearly a week and food and petrol were scarce. Now, the Ozzy foot patrols are still around but you don’t blink an eye at the sight of camouflage. New restaurants, bars and businesses are popping up everywhere around town, it’s hard to keep up.

Ryan from the Lonely Planet has been in town to get an update for the new East Timor guide. He came across a very popular saying in Dili, which is ‘You know where such and such used to be?’ No I’m afraid I don’t! Whereas in the UK you are given directions by the pubs, here directions are given on the basis of where things used to be! Very helpful!

One of Ryan’s frustrations is that he has to put the proper official names of roads and places on the maps, not the names they are known by. For example the road that we live on is officially named ‘Avenue de Portugal’, but it’s known by the locals as Pantai Kelapa (Coconut Beach) or the Beach Road.

Other common names include:-

Banana Road – The only dual carriageway in Dili that funnily enough is lined with banana trees.

Pig Bridge – A small bridge that has always got pigs feeding under it.

Rubbish Ridge – An unofficial dumping ground up the hill, which was recently cleared by a bulldozer pushing all the rubbish over the edge of the ridge. Very eco friendly!

Jesus’ Backside – The beach behind the Jesus statue

Muscle Beach - The beach in front of the Caz Bar where the GNR work out

Cock Rock – This was named by a recent visitor and needs no explanation!

Ryan had his work cut out for him visiting all the new hotels and restaurants. Unfortunately the first day he arrived we had a freak downpour and I arrived back from a dive to find a power cut, Nelson stuffing towels into crevices and Ann and Wayne running round the house lifting any electrical wires and appliances off of the floor. By the time Ryan arrived, the electricity was back but the veranda was soaked through with soggy cushions and a very muddy floor. Two days later he was laid up in bed with Timor Tummy after eating at one of the old favourite haunts, what a great impression he must have!

Another interesting couple turned up at our door, Liliana and Emile are from Switzerland and have been travelling for 22 years in the same Toyota Truck. East Timor was country number 156, but they got themselves into the Guiness Book of Records at country number 114! Their truck is amazing, bright turquoise with every country they have visited, (in order), painted down the side. Lilliana showed me the inside; they have everything in there from a stove, to a pull out sink to a spice rack. A real mobile home, amazing!

I recently paid a visit to Ross's new place. It ‘Used to be’ the Monkey Bar, but when the crisis hit, he got the contract to do the Ozzy troops laundry. With the money he made from that he has opened a fantastic furniture shop with beautiful, stylish pieces imported from Indonesia, that’s one thing that is sorely lacking here. Before Ross arrived, I spotted a trampoline in his garden and couldn’t resist a bounce. It was great fun; I haven’t done that in years.

Taxis are still not running after dark, so some of Ross's staff gave Robbie and I a lift to One More Bar where a great Timorese band were playing. As I climbed in the front of the minivan, I heard a squeal like a pig, it turned out I had stepped on a chicken which was in the dark foot well of the van. That’s another first for me; well you don’t expect a chicken to be there do you?

Ann was invited to the Birthday party of the owner of Hotel California, a new hotel and bar that has opened on the beach. The view over the bay watching the sunset is fantastic. The bar itself is decorated with shells and stones and very stylishly done, although personally I would rather see shells on the beach. The food was great and the same band as I saw a couple of nights before were playing. They opened with ‘Hotel California’ which of course was very appropriate, then played a mixture of Portuguese and English songs. It doesn’t matter whether the song is slow or fast, the Timorese all dance to in the same way, arm around the waist, the other hand holding their partners hand and held away from their body in a kind of waltzing shuffle. When Ann got up and strutted her stuff to a fast number, I watched a table of Timorese girls giggling shyly and imitating her moves. I wonder what they would make of a rave?

On the way to a dive at K41, we pulled in by the side of the road to join the rest of the village watch a Blackhawk helicopter take off. It had landed on their football pitch. They are amazing things to watch, but so noisy! It reminded me of the Vietnam movies. I was teaching an American UN volunteer at the time, so to make car conversation we started comparing English English against American English. It went something along the lines of......

‘So this is the hood?’......’No, it’s the bonnet’
‘So this is the Windshield?’......’No, it’s the Windscreen’
‘So this is the Trunk?’.......’No, it’s the boot’
‘So this is the Sidewalk?’.......’No, it’s the pavement’
Etc, etc.

Then he asked me why we spelt theatre and centre wrong. Bloody Americans, you’d think they invented the English language! However, despite the language differences he was a great student and our dive at Ricks Rapture was excellent. The clarity of the water that morning was exceptional and you could see for 20 to 25 meters.

Another great dive this week was at Dili Rock where we spent a full five minutes watching Fred the turtle, literally 3 meters away from us, until he got bored and buggered off. I also saw my second frog fish in East Timor this week, a little lemon one. I think Andy thought that Jurgen and I had got Nitrogen Narcosis at 12 meters, coz we were doing a silly little underwater scuba dance after we had seen it.

He Handsome! - East Timor 23rd May 2007

2007-05-23T01:32:00.000-07:00

He Handsome! – East Timor 23rd May 2007

The second Presidential elections were held last week and it was a landslide victory to Ramos Horta as rumour predicted. Although it’s not surprising that he got the majority vote, as when a couple of female voters were asked why they were going to vote for Ramos Horta, they replied ‘He Handsome!’ I guess political campaigning is a new concept in East Timor.

The actual voting day appeared to go without too much trouble, although there were rumours that Fretlin were threatening to destroy the polling stations in some areas. Unfortunately the day of the new Presidents inauguration didn’t quite go so smoothly. One local character described it as a ‘Rock concert starring ‘The Throwing Stones’ and ‘The Smashing Pumpkins’’.
A friend was in Tiger Fuels when a guy turned up on a motorbike and walked into the shop. His mobile phone rang and as he pulled it out of his pocket to answer it, out fell a grenade! The guy grabbed it and sped away on his motorbike. Unfortunately because there are very few motorbikes with number plates, it’s a waste of time reporting it, but a grenade going off in a petrol garage doesn’t bear thinking about.

The UN report highlighting the erratic driving practices of UN personnel and the subsequent report in the Sydney Morning Herald, appears to have brought the speed down around town, which is a good thing. I just wish they would apply the mobile phone use rule as well. Waiting to pull out of Tiger Fuels I watched the driver of a UN Police car texting with his eyes completely off the road. In the UK and Australia, using a mobile phone which is not hands free whilst driving is subject to a heavy fine and points on your licence. So if it is illegal to do something in your own country, what makes it acceptable to do here? Here ends the soapbox speech!

It was Fat Old Sod’s birthday last Monday so he threw a party at the Smokehouse which was great. Mrs Sod and I managed to sneak down there earlier and arrange with the girls to put up a banner and some balloons. Since then I’ve been flat out on the diving front with a mixture of courses including teaching Philippine cops Open Water, Discover Scubas and night dives. We have been so busy that Jurgen and I have been sharing the teaching. I had to call him the other day and request in my polite English Manner, ‘Could you please ask Jurgen if he would mind dropping off the DVD after he drops the kids at school please?’ This was translated by his wife as ‘She wants the DVD first thing in the morning!’ Slightly lost in translation, the difference between the over polite English and the direct, efficient Germans!

The night dive at Dili rock this week was stunning, we saw crabs, cuttlefish, squid, shrimp, a huge moray in a hole and a free swimming moray, angel fish and a really unusual nudibranch called a Pleurbranchus grandis, I’ve never seen one before.

As we surfaced, the sky was glittering with stars, which is one of my favourite parts of a night dive. I looked around to check on my divers and noticed that I had gained one! Instead of 3 other torches I counted four. Where the hell had the extra diver appeared from? It wasn’t until the diver said ‘Bon Noite Mister. Fish?’ that I realised it was a local spear fisherman in a divers mask holding an underwater torch. I’ve met this guy at Dili Rock before, he often sits on his haunches, spear in hand watching us kit up, intrigued with what we are doing.

When we got out of the water, the fisherman showed us his catch which included an enormous squid that one of my divers bought for $10. It weighed 7 kilos and was fresh out of the water, I bet it tasted delicious.

The Magic Man - East Timor 7th May 2007

2007-05-07T02:14:00.000-07:00

This week is the one year anniversary of the start of the trouble in East Timor. To mark the occasion we had a Lulik ceremony where we each chucked a stone at the wall to mark hopefully the last stone to be thrown, the Timorese however took a more solemn approach and lined the streets with candles to mark the occasion.

Talking of Lulik ceremonies, our housekeepers youngest child has been sick for 10 days, so she took him to the doctors but he hasn’t got any better, so now she is taking a few days off and travelling 4 hours to Same to see her village Lulik man (witch doctor), so much for modern medicine. Good news though, she returned today and it seems the magic has worked.

A friend of mine had a bit of a neighbourhood dispute while I was away; unfortunately their house was stuck between the guy the village had a gripe with, and some feisty villagers that would not make the Red Socks. Their aim with the stones was so bad that they were landing on my friend’s roof instead. To solve this, the Lulik man of the village took some soil from the battleground, mixed it with water and made both parties drink it, so that if anyone fights on that ground again they will face the curse of Lulik magic. Case closed, the Timorese are very superstitious and wouldn’t dare upset the gods.

I love some of the ways Timorese translates, some of my favourites are:-
Ulun-fatuk moras – Head stone sickness (Headache)
Isin rua – Body two (Pregnant)
Laran Sa’e – Inside to go up (Feel like vomiting)

Recently, the incidents against Malai have increased, not major incidents but more opportunistic. These types of incidents can happen (and do happen) in any major city of the world, muggings, hotel rooms burgled, car vandalism, etc. However, a couple came round to return some snorkelling equipment on Saturday and they had been robbed by a couple of guys, one wielding a machete. They came out of the water to find a couple of guys by the car demanding money, the girl made a run for it and while the guys were distracted, the boyfriend gunned the engine and managed to screech away picking up his girlfriend en-route, not before they had lost a wallet and a camera though. Rest assured we always take security when we go snorkelling or diving, it’s just a shame that we need to.

Talking of screeching away, the UN has been given a ticking off this week. At a town hall meeting this week it was announced that in 2 months there have been over 80 traffic accidents where UN vehicles were the only vehicles involved. Last Saturday, a UN car was stopped at 1.35 am because of erratic driving. Needless to say the driver was drunk, but then proceeded to assault the police!

In response to this incident, UN Security set up a check point between Pig Bridge (Yes it really is known as that!) and the Dili 2001 Hotel. Between the hours of 1 am and 4 am, 26 UN vehicles were stopped, 4 UN staff members tested positive to a breath test. 1 refused to take the test! 3 vehicles and 2 weapons were impounded and 7 non UN staff were being carried as passengers in UN cars without permission. Mmmm, alcohol, guns and driving, a pretty lethal combination me thinks!

In the same speech it was stated ‘Many of you say that the driving conditions here can be challenging’. I don’t disagree, what with taxis doing 15km per hour, motorbikes not having mirrors, pigs/goats/dogs/kids running out in the road unexpectedly, indicators that are ornaments, pot holes and now traffic lights that are sporadically adhered to. But we were always taught to ‘read the road ahead’, if the UN slowed down a bit, then they may be able to find it less challenging and decrease the number of accidents!

The Presidential elections were not 200,000 votes over; apparently someone got the decimal in the wrong place! However, to win the election the candidate must have 50% plus 1 vote, which none of the candidates did. So the re-election is on Wednesday, and so far there has been no trouble just a few isolated incidents in the normal trouble spots. The atmosphere actually seems calmer and more positive since my return, taxis are actually running just after dark and it feels safer to walk around at night. Obviously with an air of caution, there are still absolute no go areas. I think everyone is sick to the back teeth of the violence and hopefully the June parliamentary elections will close the chapter on this unsettled year. Only time will tell, you come to expect the unexpected in East Timor.

Diving has been a bit quiet this week, mainly due to me being stuffed up with a cold. A real shame because the water is calm and the visibility is about 20 meters. Still it looks like what was the little rainy season we had is over, so the visibility just gets better and better from now on.

At one with nature – East Timor 27th April 2007

2007-04-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

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!

Rice Race – East Timor 23rd February 2007

2007-02-26T21:32:00.000-08:00

There is a shortage of rice in East Timor at the moment, apparently the government didn’t order enough plus with the very late wet season, the crops are down. The price of a 50kg bag of rice has gone up from $15 to over $30, some rumours put it up as high as $55. So the latest unrest in Dili is all about rice, or lack of it, which seems crazy as before the crisis most people couldn’t afford rice and existed on cassava and potatoes which do grow easily here. But because rice has been handed out for free during the last few months by aid agencies, the shortage and black market inflated prices are causing rioting in the streets.

We had been out to lunch and popped into Landmark supermarket to pick up some shopping. Landmark at the moment is a caution area as trouble often kicks off along that road. There were a few UNPol around and a bit of an atmosphere, as we drove through Bebeno we found out why, loads of guys running down the street with rice bags on their backs and happy smiling faces. They had just raided one of the government rice stores.

I was talking to a lady who’s job was looking after rice distribution at the (ex) British Embassy pancake do that night. She told me about the raid and the fact she waited ½ an hour before calling UNPol. “It’s their rice after all”. Good lady.

Much, much earlier that morning, 6am to be precise, I was driving to Dili Rock for an early morning dive. Coming up to the new traffic lights, they started to turn red so I slowly braked, but nothing happened, I went cruising through the red lights, luckily it was early an nothing was on the road. Coming back was a different matter, unfortunately the traffic lights are on a dip, so I couldn’t stop the truck, I had to turn the wheel into some gravel to stop myself going into the back of the line of traffic. That was more than a little hairy. Crawling back to the dive centre, Nelson was waiting for me at the gate, and started to laugh when I overshot the dive centre and had to reverse back, he thought I’d just been daydreaming until I explained about the brakes. Today, we heard a loud bang and the whole house shook, Wayne rammed the outside wall and Ann came out with the classic line ‘I take it we’ve got no brakes then!’ Needless to say we can’t drive it until the spare parts arrive.

Apparently the traffic lights are going to be turned off again because since they have been working there has been an increase in car muggings when car stop at the red light. Another unsuccessful project!

In other hairy moments this week, we had gunfire behind the Esplanada the other night, and a few days ago the FDTL (local army) fired 2 shots from an M16 into the Kampong next to us. Two men from the IDP camps have been killed by the Australian military, the first casualties by foreign troops. One of the men killed was firing an Ambon arrow at the soldier when he shot him. I don’t blame him, if I was faced with an Ambon arrow, I’d probably do the same. They are nasty things with hooks at the end which they dip in poison or excrement.

Anyway, the result of these fatalities was a protest yesterday to present a petition to the Australian Embassy, and then the protest would proceed to Bacau for the funeral. The UNPol and GNR were out in force, but no with no Australian UNPol or troops. They re-routed the protest and let a small faction present the petition which basically demanded that all foreign troops pull out of East Timor. Like that’s going to happen! As a precaution, Lindsay arrived from Darwin yesterday with a load of Union Jacks for us. The last thing you want to be flying at the moment is an Australian flag.

When he went to hire a car, Lindsay asked what the policy was if the car got rocked, as there is no insurance in this country. He was told, any damage he had to pay for. Then he asked what if he caught the scrote that did it, and brought him to them. The reply was, they would kill the scrote, but he still had to pay for any damage!

Meanwhile Alfredo ransacked three police stations and made off with a load of guns. You may recall Alfredo is a rebel leader that escaped from prison some months back. He’s supposedly hiding out in Same, so the UN have evacuated all personnel from Same and surrounding areas. The place is surrounded by troops. Let’s hope this time if they catch him, that they can keep hold of him.

On the diving front, I’ve had a fantastic week. I’ve been teaching speci

alities and will certify my first master scuba diver tonight. I did my first night dive in East Timor at K41 and had a huge turtle an arm stretch away from me as well as a frogfish, lobster and blue spotted stingray. At the weekend I saw 4 humphead parrotfish and today, shark, moray eels, a flying gurnard, barracuda, mantis shrimp and squid, incredible.

Jurgen came back from his IDC (Instructor Development Course) and IE (Instructors Exams) in Bali. He passed with flying colours as I knew he would, but I was like an expectant mum back here waiting for the results. The other good news is that we are a tic free zone again, the injections worked, thank god.

Green for Stop? – East Timor 5th of January 2007

2007-02-12T23:35:00.000-08:00

New Years Eve we did a bit of a tour starting at Hotel Dili, then Castaways, popped into Tiger fuels and said happy new year to Jim and Whitey, then the Smokehouse, One more Bar who had a band playing, and finally Yoey’s place. Unfortunately we missed midnight by about 2 minutes but driving along the Banana Road the Timorese were out banging metal poles for all they were worth and dancing outside the nativity scenes. We were in time however for the fireworks at Yoey’s, which was the busiest place we had been all night. Leading up to Christmas you couldn’t get a flight out of Dili, they were fully booked from the 12th to the 24th so many people took the opportunity to get away over New Years, so Dili was relatively quiet.

Late that night we heard that Whitey had been in a motorcycle accident and was being medivaced to Darwin. The accident had happened around 9.30 that evening only 10 minutes after we had spoke to him at Tiger Fuels where he had been wearing his crash helmet. Apparently the local army (FDTL) were overtaking each other at speed in their trucks and had run over Whitey. Unfortunately he’s not in a good way and the guys responsible have gone into hiding and are refusing access for the trucks to be inspected. Somebody needs to be held accountable for the accident, if the tables were turned and a Malai was involved in an accident with a Timorese, then the Malai pays whether it’s their fault or not. We are advised that in the case of an accident, to just keep driving, don’t stop, no matter what and get to the nearest police station.

My only run in with the FDTL was a few months back when I was crawling up the hill fully loaded in the truck. The first of 10 FDTL trucks came tearing down the hill, packed with machine gun wielding soldiers and screamed at me ‘Get out of the way!’ This is easier said than done when you are in first gear going uphill in a heavy truck. But these were the guys that were responsible for shooting 9 unarmed policemen back in April. The road has been blocked off with stones in memoriam to the dead ever since it happened.

Crash helmets are compulsory in East Timor, but since the trouble started this law is being ignored. You often see a family of four on a moped and not one of them with a crash helmet. For those that do wear them they are often thin moulded plastic, not even as protective as a hard hat and in fact would probably cause more damage by shattering into the skull on impact. We watched one guy yesterday, stop his motorbike to pick up his crash helmet when it fell off. He promptly put it back on over his baseball cap, didn’t do it up and it would probably fall off again in the next five minutes. The problem is the Timorese were told they had to wear crash helmets, but no one explained to them why and the benefits.

To cause more chaos on the streets, the UN are putting in 10 sets of traffic lights. For a capital city with no traffic lights, no street lights and a rule that you stop on a roundabout to let traffic come on, this seems pretty ludicrous. They are either going to be ignored or some drivers are going to sit and stare at them because they don’t know what to do. They are also painting pedestrian crossings on the road. Let’s see how many accidents they cause. The UN would be better off either investing the money in a proper driving education scheme or getting the street lights working again and making Dili feel safer at night.

Tonight I was driving home and the streets were pitch black (hence the need for street lights!). I wasn’t driving fast but there was a dog lying in the middle of the road, as soon as it saw the car, it bolted, and there was a sickening yelp as it went under the wheels. I drove another half a mile then pulled over and bawled my eyes out. I couldn’t stop to put the dog out of its misery as the local villagers would demand money for the dog and it could get nasty. They certainly demand money for livestock such as pigs, cows, goats and chickens if Malai run them over. I felt devastated, especially when our three dogs have taken to escaping recently because they are petrified of the fire crackers. Sickie has cut his head open trying to get out of the fence and Bandit went AWOL on New Years Eve in the middle of a thunderstorm. I know how I would feel if anything happened to them as I’m completely soppy about dogs, I even had a soft spot for our scabby instructors dog called Chicken Bones in Egypt.

I’m going to get on my soapbox again, this time it’s about the American Embassy. Of course like most embassies here it’s on prime time land overlooking the sea and they have just built a 25meter, 4 lane swimming pool in the grounds, visible by all the surrounding kampongs, the residents of which think rice is a luxury. Anyway if that wasn’t bad enough, American residents of East Timor only were allowed to use the pool and up to 5 of their guests, this was recently changed to Embassy staff only were allowed to invite guests, providing the were Malai, not Timorese, how racist it that, it’s disgraceful! It really pisses me off when the Malai act as if it’s just a job and the country doesn’t exist. This is Dili not Washington or Sydney, live with it!

Another incident involving the American Embassy was on Christmas Eve. Ros’s daughter had a temperature on nearly 40 degrees which in this country is usually a sign of malaria. She is an American citizen so they tried to see the American doctor at the Embassy on Christmas Day only to be told she could only see the doctor if they had a letter from the Ambassador himself. Luckily they managed to find another doctor and it wasn’t malaria just a virus.

We often get overlanders coming through East Timor doing the trip either UK to Australia or the other way round. Also we get people that want to visit every country on earth and East Timor is one of the newest. Lynda is the latest overlander starting out from Spain 21 months ago on her 600cc Kawaski motorbike. Lynda is tiny and the bike is huge in comparison, especially since she’s lost 10 kilos during her trip. To get any vehicle into Australia is must be taken apart and meticulously cleaned as Australia is very fussy regarding bugs entering the country. I remember years ago travelling in Australia and you were not allowed to take any foodstuffs into Queensland because of the fruit fly risk. Usually the overlanders hang around for a week or so, doing the cleaning themselves (which is a hell of a job), or getting their vehicle cleaned (which is very expensive), ready to be shipped to Darwin. Throughout the journey, Lynda had cushioned her bum with a sheepskin rug which was very dirty and bedraggled by now. Obviously there was no way that the Australians would let her take that into their country so she had a cremation ceremony for it and played Baa Baa Black Sheep on a whistle while it burned

I’ve been reasonably busy on the diving front with Open water courses, a mixture of soldiers, doctors and now a geologist. One of the GNR I have been teaching to dive is banned from drinking throughout his whole six month mission in East Timor. Apparently, when he first got here he went on a binge and got himself lost in Dili, so the whole of the GNR were scouring the streets looking for him. After that his boss banned him from drinking!

Population! Who has a clue! - East Timor 15th January 2007

2007-02-12T23:33:00.000-08:00

This weekend we did a diving trip to Atauro and stayed on the Island overnight. The island is beautiful and very different from Dili. The population here is approx 8000, 70% of which are strict protestant, rather than the mainland which is nearly all catholic. According to folklore, when the Indonesians invaded and landed on the island, the chief from the village came down to meet them. He asked the troops ‘Who was in charge?’ And when the leader identified himself, the chief picked up his gun and shot him! So shocked by this, the troops ran back to their boat and high tailed back to Dili.

The only way to get to the island is by ferry that runs once a week (sporadically!) or by chartering a boat. Some backpackers have taken the cheap fishing boat route, but have come back with tales of endurance, sunburn, and sodden possessions, and with the weather turning now, it really isn’t a safe option. Barry runs an Eco Lodge over on the island and back in March his wife Nema was eight months pregnant with their first child. We had cyclone warnings at the time and the sea was very rough when Nema developed preeclampsia. Despite having 3 doctors staying at the lodge and the valiant efforts of 5 boats trying to get to the island, Nema and her unborn child died because she couldn’t get to medical care. In her memory, Barry renamed the resort Nema’s.

Barry is the only Malai in the village, but because he and Nema were so integrated in the community, Nema’s family and the village have supported him in developing the lodge, which now has a 4th hut being constructed. I say hut, but the buildings are sturdy two storeys affairs with a small veranda and a hammock outside. At night the lights are powered by solar electricity and the generator only goes on for an hour a day to keep the freezers cold for beer. The beer is bought from the local kiosk and resold to guests. Rather than bringing it in from the mainland, Barry would rather put the money into the local economy. Stocks brought in from Dili are transported via one of the 5 vehicle on the island (2 of which are not working!). There is only one road, so hopefully traffic lights won’t be the next UN project here!

The Timorese are very superstitious and believe an old couple in the village are witches and put a curse on Nema because she married a Malai. In Liquica this week three women were killed by the community for being witches. The UN have got their work cut out for them trying to develop this country if they are still witch hunting like they did in medieval times.

We set off on Saturday afternoon and stopped en-route to Nema’s to dive at Manta Cove. This is still up in my top 10 dives of all time, I just wished I had my camera with me, you cannot describe how beautiful the coral and sponges are. We then moored up outside Nema’s and were transported to the lodge is a very precarious dug out which wobbled with the slightest movement.

Barry gave us a tour of the lodge including his latest building which is under construction at the moment. The bathroom facilities are separate to the buildings because the toilets are dug out pits in the ground. He has built a raised block above the toilet and stuck a toilet seat with a lid on top of it, so it feels like a real toilet. Loo roll is kept in a plastic bucket next to the loo to keep it dry in the rain as the toilets don’t have roofs. The washing areas are separate again with a mandi arrangement. A mandi is a large bucket of water with a pail which is very common throughout Asia. The idea is you douse yourself with water, soap up, then rinse off. I actually enjoy washing this way and it’s much more economical on water compared to a shower.

The lodge is on the beach so it has superb sunsets and sunrises. We watched a local fisherman walk out of the water with 10 sardines between his fingers. That was the last of the fishing for the weekend, because being strict protestant they are not allowed to work on Sundays. We wandered round the village before sunset, everyone is so friendly here, they are so poor, and their living arrangements are so basic, but you don’t get the ‘One dollar Mister!’ like you do in Dili. We only spotted one IDP tent, but at the height of the troubles there were 2000 IDP’s here which increased the population by 25% and put a big strain on the natural resources.

They don’t have birth certificates in East Timor, but there is a register when a child is baptised. However, they don’t have death certificates either and the last couple of Census they tried to do here were disasters. The population is supposed to be around the million mark, but who knows without any form of registration.

We were offered a pre-dinner appetiser of deep fried tiny crabs which you eat whole, they were delicious. Dinner was fresh tuna with cassava chips, vegetables and rice followed by a sticky toffee made from boiled condensed milk, (the nearest thing they have to chocolate on the island). The room that I was sleeping in was quite hot and sticky under the mosquito dome so I ended up sleeping under the starts in the hammock on the veranda with a lovely cool breeze from the sea.

The next days diving took us to Barstool, then made our way back to Dili. Sailing through the channel between the two islands we were surrounded by dolphins as far as the eye could see, there were hundreds of them. They were jumping and somersaulting, I’ve never seen dolphins jump that high out of the water, it was spectacular.

Damp and Rank – East Timor 20th January 2007

2007-02-12T23:21:00.000-08:00

The diving went a bit quiet this week, the UN are back from their extended holidays but need to be seen to be working. Dedication and all that! You can tell that the UN are back with the return of the 3 hour nightly power cuts. Bless them; they just can’t survive without their air-con.

So when a Thai guy walked in and asked us to do a commercial salvage job, it was more than welcome. He described the job as locating and raising a propeller of a large Thai fishing boat, ½ a kilometre off shore in 30 meters of water. The prop was supposed to weigh 20 kilos which sounded a bit suspicious as Thai fishing boats are normally big so the prop would normally weigh 200kg not 20. The location of the boat was on the south coast which is unexplored territory as far as diving. We would be the first people in history to scuba dive the south coast of East Timor (we think!).

We set out on our adventure on Wednesday morning, loaded up with tanks, lines, torches and snack food, we literally raided Tiger Fuels (Dili’s equivalent of a 24hr BP Garage). The road out of Dili is steep and we were soon shrouded in thick fog, we were in the clouds! It was weird to be cold for the first time in East Timor, in Dili it’s a humid 33 degrees at the moment and doesn’t vary much from that. Because of the moisture, it’s really lush up there and you immediately see different vegetation and flowers. The road took us to Aileu where the heavens opened and unfortunately because the truck was filled with bodies, we had to put our overnight packs in the back so our clothes got soaked. What the hell, we were on an adventure.

The scenery on the way to Maubisse reminded me of Bali with tiered rice paddies and water buffalo. In Maubisse itself there is a hotel which is situated on top of a hill overlooking the valleys below. This is where Alfredo was camped out with his rebel troops in May/June this year.

Throughout the journey to Same the scenery changed, I was reminded of the lush hills and dark earth of Guatemala, the flat roads of Dartmoor, the wood smoke of Nepal and at one point the mountains of Switzerland with the clouds cutting the mountains and cabins dotted everywhere. We even started referring to Switzerland, on the way back we agreed to stop at Switzerland for a pee stop. In fact we stopped at Dartmoor because Switzerland was on an uphill gradient. A dog decided to bark at us there and the sound echoed through the mountains.

All through the journey, with some awful roads, we passed small villages where the kids waved and screamed ‘Malai, Malai’. You see more and more horses up here and often see old guys riding them, one guy wore a cowboy hat with ‘Marlboro’ emblazoned on in, a different type of ‘Marlboro Man’ than the American cigarette adverts, this one was smoking a clove cigarette.

The boat was situated about 5km from the costal village of Betano, a 7hr drive from Dili. The boat was about 1½ km from shore, not ½ a km and although the sea was calm but there was a huge swells which could make the job more hairy. The fishing boat sent a tinny out (a tinny is an Ozzy description of a small boat with an outboard motor, but in this case it was a traditional Thai motor with a propeller on a stick), which the Thai guys promptly capsized much to the amusement of the local village. Of course the Thai guys didn’t speak English or Tetum, so with improvisation and fingers we arranged to meet them at 6am the next morning.

One of the guys wanted to sleep on the beach but after being ravaged by sand flies in two minutes flat we revised the plan and talked to chief of the village. We were not exactly sure that he was the chief but certainly the caretaker of the school, which, we were heartened to see, was the most modern, well kept building in the village. The boys were going to camp out but because I wasn’t married to any of them, ‘Missus’ had to sleep separately, so the villagers offered me a bed in their house. I’d had similar treatment in Lombok years ago when I stayed on a tobacco farm. If a Malai is a guest then they are given the best room in the house no matter how many people it normally sleeps. I was presented with a small airless room with a double bed, mosquito net and a garish pink bedspread and matching frilly pillow, the best room in the house. There was no running water and the toilets were a hole in the ground, but we were given special treatment because the caretaker unlocked the school toilets for us which were clean with running water (literally!). I actually slept like a log because we had had a power cut for the whole night the night before. The power surge had actually blown up our connection this time, so I hadn’t had more than 3 fitful hours the night before.

After sleeping arrangement negotiations, Wayne opened the cooler and offered the elder men of the village a beer which they accepted with flourish, he had to stop the kids helping themselves though. The boys then erected the tent which fascinated everyone; I bet that they have never seen a house made like that before. Unfortunately the boys didn’t get such a good night’s sleep, drenched in their own sweat and dew and listening to the villagers talk half the night, topped off with a baby crying. I didn’t hear any of that; I was dead to the world.

The next morning we set off for the boat, we decided to swim in, kitted up rather than torture the Thais into beaching the tinny again. Wayne had the idea of being towed in, but unfortunately I had my long wetsuit on and my legs were incredibly buoyant, so I was hanging on with my arms outstretched unable to get my fins down, after a while my arms wouldn’t take it any more so we gave up on that idea and got on board. Once we boarded the Thai fishing boat we were greeted by coffee, biscuits and 5 pigs! Poor things, their fate is pretty much sealed. The captain of the boat was Indonesia with a mixed crew of Thai and Timorese. They explained that we were not looking for the prop but a cap/nut that holds the prop on, hence the weight of 20kg. Wayne and I dropped down the line that marked the search site and the visibility was OK for the first 20 meters, but after that it was like diving in soup, a maximum of 2 foot visibility. After letting our eyes adjust we realised the bottom was pure silt, and anything heavy would have probably sunk, any movement and you had no visibility whatsoever. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack and at 31 meters the maximum time we had down there was 17 minutes.

During the surface interval we boarded the fishing boat again and were presented with a lunch of rice with fish, or fish, or fish, funny that! At least it wasn’t fresh pork. The crew had managed to secure a line down to mark the site and we found out how. At the back of the boat there was a small compressor, commonly used for inflating tyres. Attached to this was 40 or so meters of clear thin rubber tubing which was directly attached to an old fashioned divers mask, with a valve to exhale out of the nose. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill themselves.

Our second attempt gave us a couple more foot visibility and we changed the search pattern but to no avail. When on the 3rd attempt one full circle couldn’t be achieved due to diabolical visibility, we gave up for the day and hot legged it to Same in search of a dry bed and wet beer. We found a small hotel that gave us just that as well as a slap up feed, after which we all crashed for the night, knackered! The only thing to add to this was the presence of Boris. At 4am I needed the loo, grabbing a candle as the generator was off, headed for the loo only to come face to face with an extremely large spider. Luckily I’m not faint hearted when it comes to spiders, but I did wave my candle near it to evict it from the loo seat as I didn’t fancy sharing.

We decided to give it one last shot in the morning, although we had enough tanks for a 2nd dive we were keen to get home. Firstly because we had found out from Ann that some little scrote had shot our dog Doris with an Ambon arrow during the night (she’s ok) and secondly because our damp clothes were now rank and we couldn’t stand the smell of each other. The 4th dive was no more fruitful than the previous 3, the visibility was bad again and the swell was up to two meters which made getting in and out pretty dangerous. We managed to get out with our kit on but the Thais managed to capsize the tinny again, worryingly with one of them trapped underneath, but luckily he emerged 30 seconds later, but we lost a weight-belt in the mean time.

The constant presence of 50 plus kids was also getting a little claustrophobic. Initially they had been shy and giggling, but now they were getting bolder, so every time we were on shore we had a throng of kids standing and staring not two feet away from us, which was great when I was trying to get changed. The previous day, I walked up to use the school loo and as I walked back I could hear the shuffle of small feet behind me getting louder and louder. I turned suddenly and shouted ‘Waaaaaaah’ at them, they scampered away only to dissolve in fits of giggles seconds later. You can’t really blame the kids for being curious, we are probably the first Malai they have seen in a long time, I am probably the only female they have seen with white blond hair in a wetsuit and scuba gear, in fact, we are probably the first scuba divers they have seen. Most of the locals where we dive regularly just think we are really bad fishermen, we go in with all this technical gear on, and come up an hour later with no fish!

It was a shame that we didn’t manage to find the treasure, it felt quite dissatisfying, but we hadn’t really got a chance in hell, if we had found it, it would have been sheer luck. But the trip itself was worth it, for the journey, not the diving and we were getting paid for it. Can’t be bad!

Baby Jesus Underwater - East Timor 27th December 2006

2007-01-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

My break in Bali was great but it was so hot and humid. Luckily I treated myself to a great hotel where I had a lovely bungalow with air con, satellite TV, swimming pool, king size bed and hot water, all the things I don’t have in East Timor, so much of the time I was collapsed under the air con. The nice thing about Bali at the moment is its off season so the price per night was about £14, the bad thing about the off season is Bali is dead so everyone is desperate for business and the street hassle gets unbearable. I can’t count the number of times I was asked if I want transport.

I nearly got injured as I walked out of Bali airport, walking across the car park to the taxi rank. It was windy and out of the corner of my eye I saw the back of kiosk moving, I jumped back but as the metal sheeting fell it scraped down my arm. After coming out of a land of gun battles, ambon arrows and stone throwing, I nearly get taken out in Bali by a low flying kiosk!

I caught up with some diving instructor mates that have restored a shipwreck, it’s a beautiful boat and we spent a great evening on it drinking beer and watching the sun go down. My other activity in Bali was shopping, it’s great there, you go into a shop and pick out the basic design and they will make the clothes in your shape and size within a couple of days, although I couldn’t find a plain white T-shirt for love nor money!

When I got back to Dili I met up with Robbie for dinner, and he’s got a new goat called Bibi, very cute. Millie sadly did not return. Robbie has painted a sign on the side of his house warning of goat security instead of ‘Beware of the Dog!’

I’ve been busy since I got back; I’ve been teaching a Polish tourist, a Portuguese policeman and an Australian helicopter pilot, you meet interesting people in this job. I’d been diving one morning and had hung up my swimming costume to dry on the line, then grabbed it and put it on in the Esplanada toilets. I sat down to give my students a dive briefing when I felt I was being bitten. I ran and jumped into the swimming pool, my swimming costume was full of ants!

This morning we were at Dili Rock preparing for a dive when an Australian soldier approached us and asked us to avoid using the road. A Black Hawk helicopter was just about to take off from the football field, it was magnificent to watch but the dust was incredible, there is no way it would be safe for a car passing at that time, it was a complete brown out.

I came home this afternoon and started laughing, Wayne was sitting on the porch wearing a flashing Santa Claus hat, looking like one of the grumpy old gits, ‘Ho, bloody ho!’ We were singing Christmas carols on the way home from the dive site yesterday, it felt quite weird in 30◦ with the sun shining. I’ve had Christmases abroad in the heat before but I’ve never worked on Christmas day, this year we are taking a load of customers out diving and Christmas dinner on the beach, should be fun.

All around Dili, nativity scenes are being built. With 94% Catholicism, Christmas is a big deal. The nativity scenes are big, about 2 metres high and a meter tall and each village has one. Jurgen did a deal in his village, where he provided the lights providing they stop singing at 10pm. Unfortunately the fire crackers don’t stop then, they are so loud and sound like gunshots, which is not great in this country at this time. Its funny comparing Guy Fawkes Day in the UK, where everyone stands back to let off a rocket and here, where they think throwing a fire cracker at each other is funny!

I’m house sitting Jurgen’s house at the moment which is great, hot water, air con and TV, I feel like I’m on holiday again. The best thing about it is I get the car for two weeks, a great Pajero with power steering, air con, a handbrake and music. It’s so nice to have a bit of power, reverse out without straining your arm muscles and stop on a hill without playing the clutch and best of all no rattling. The old dive truck serves its purpose but it’s nice to drive a posh car again.

The crime situation here seems to have calmed down a bit, talking to the NZ police it seems there are fewer incidents but when they happen they are more violent. Rather than just stone throwing there are ambon arrows, grenades and firearms. A Timorese guy died recently from gunshot wounds and the Dili rumour mill was it was the Ozzy forces that shot him. However talking to someone in ‘the know’, they said they investigated the site where the body was found and there was no way that the only Ozzy forces guy that opened fire could have killed him, angle, range etc. However, the body was removed immediately and buried and without an autopsy to remove the bullet, nothing can be concluded. The one force guy (not sure if he was army or police) that did open fire, did so when he was faced with a youth armed with a shotgun.

Talking of guns, we had a Kiwi soldier diving with us last week. He came along with his mate who was just there to guard the guns. It was pretty weird seeing machine guns next to the dive equipment.

The rain has started, not daily yet, but when it rains. Within 10 minutes the kitchen was flooding, so we were running round the house making sure there were no electrical cables on the floor, shouting over the noise as the veranda has a tin roof. In nearly all south-east Asian countries you will find the plug sockets half way up the wall, which seems strange and awkwardly placed until you see the rain coming in and realise that there is very sound logic to it. I had to wade ankle deep out to car, my new fancy Bali flip flops are not going to survive very long at this rate. Luckily there were no leaks at Jurgen’s house.

Christmas day went off without a hitch, luckily I was not working on Christmas Eve so it gave me a chance to run Ann around for the last minute bits she needed. I picked up the turkey and the beef and luckily as I’m house-sitting at the moment we used Jurgens fridge to ease the strain on the kitchen. Wayne went up to the dive site with two of the lads, the marquee, decorations and the tanks. The boys slept at the dive site with food and four cans of beer each, so they were happy.

I picked up Robbie en route Christmas morning and he was carrying Bibi Buddah (his baby goat). Slightly worried about the upholstery of the car, I made an agreement with Robbie that if Bibi had a little accident then he would clean it up. I needn’t have worried; she was as good as gold just letting out an occasional bleat from the back seat.

Arriving at the dive site it looked fantastic, a large marquee covered in tinsel and decorations. The boys set up the tables with tablecloths and crackers and within minutes the non divers were tucking into the champagne. The first dive was 20meters visibility at K41 and we went hunting for the Santa’s that Wayne had planted around the previous day. Unfortunately the Santa’s had disappeared, probably eaten by some over zealous parrotfish! But the nativity scene at 18meters was there in all its glory, it was weighted down, we couldn’t have a buoyant baby Jesus.

I finally had my first drink n Christmas day after the second dive, a well earned glass of champagne. This is the first ever Christmas day that I have worked and although I’ve spent a couple of Christmases in Australia, where it is hot, I’ve never dived on Christmas Day.

Boxing day we closed the dive centre, 364 days a year is enough. The intention was to have cold turkey, mashed potatoes and pickle for lunch, but one of our staff appeared to have helped himself to the leftover turkey, so it was cold ham instead. To make it feel more Christmassy, Wayne had managed to get a half decent copy of the new Bond film. So we sat down with our ham and pickles, a glass of champagne and 2 hours of Daniel Craig (the new Bond) in action. All we were missing was the Only Fools and Horses Xmas special!

It seems the Christmas spirit has quietened down the trouble. Christmas day saw Timorese families in their finest outfits going to church. At night they sang, let off fire crackers and fireworks, and as far as I’m aware were no major incidents. Plus we’ve had electricity all Christmas and no rain. I’ve probably spoken too soon though, but I hope it will continue.

The Plague House – East Timor December 8th 2006

2006-12-21T02:40:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pretty healthy throughout my time in East Timor but the humidity leading up to the wet season brought on my eczema again. Luckily I only get eczema on my hands and feet but in a country that is so dusty and flip flops are standard attire, it’s almost impossible to keep your feet clean. Inevitably my feet got infected; so I started a course of antibiotics which here you can buy over the counter. That afternoon I was in the pool with a student and felt really cold. Given that we have an almost constant 30 degrees air temperature and about 28 in the water, that’s a strange feeling. I returned home and donned a t-shirt, long trousers and a fleece (haven’t used that since Heathrow Airport) and curled up in bed with a sheet over me. The electricity then went out, again! This normally makes the bedrooms unbearable for heat as there are no fans moving the air, but I was still cold.

I woke up when Ann and Wayne returned from the Esplanada having got bored with sitting in the dark again. They then quizzed me about my medical state, ‘What’s my temperature?’ ‘Do I have a rash?’ ‘Have I got a headache?’ ‘Do my joints hurt?’ I felt like I’d just gained two parents. I did have a rash and a neck ache, so Ann went into treatment mode, plenty of water; as much as you can get down your throat, panadol, monitor your temperature. Fever, rash and joint ache are classic signs of Dengue Fever which they have both had as well as malaria. Oh shit! I though, that’s all I need. But the next day I was fine, apart from my foot. I think the fever was from the infection and the rash a reaction to the antibiotics.

On the Saturday Wayne was complaining he was getting old but he had just shifted 600 bottles of mineral water. We sponsored the water at the First Lady’s Fun Run. On Sunday we had one of our busiest safaris ever, with 26 people. A tiring day for both of us, but Wayne was absolutely shattered. On the Monday he had a fever. We are lucky at the moment, we have a couple of volunteer doctors working at Dr Dan’s clinic who are also divers. So Killian came round and took a blood sample and the next day confirmed that Wayne had got malaria. The poor guys’ temperature got to just above 40 degrees which is definitely no fun when you are having nightly power cuts of up to three hours and no fan.

Meanwhile, I’m taking my second course of antibiotics and develop a nice chesty cold. Ann was muttering she was the only one in the plague house that wasn’t sick. Wayne has now recovered and I‘m infection free but still coughing well.

The diving is still good, I saw a turtle, cuttlefish and an eagle ray on Tuesday. However we had the first rain of the season yesterday which could affect visibility. The rain had been brewing up for days, and finally the storm broke and the heavens opened with fantastic thunder and lightening. We all stood out in the warm rain and got soaked through, much to the amusement of the stall holders opposite. Some of the local lads were running up and down the beach in the rain but apparently this is very subdued compared to the first rain of previous years where the whole village would be out celebrating.

Trouble kicked off in the IDP camps around Dili, which was to be expected as the rain would make the camps a walking cesspit. The government are hoping the downpours of rain will encourage some of the IDP’s to return home, but all that happened yesterday were that more fights broke out.

Eli is leaving to go back to Norway so we went to her leaving do last night which was teeming with kids, most of whom I know. I presented Ane with her Junior Scuba Diver certificate and she literally squealed with excitement all the way into the house. I managed to certify two Junior Scuba Divers last week, Ane and Angeline, the youngest ever divers in East Timor.

I did a little detour this morning on my way to dive at Dili Rock. There is a lake just behind which has turned completely red due to algae. The locals are quite superstitious about this because apparently the last time it turned red was in 1999 when the Indonesians we ransacking the country. They see this colour change as a bad omen.

Off to Bali on the 12th, a visa run and a few days of R&R, can’t wait. I need new clothes, Joselina, our housekeeper, has managed to beat or bleach mine to death. My white T-shirt with Lycra no longer has Lycra so its now very long with no stretch and almost transparent in places. However, she is the most fantastic ironer, so although your clothes are completely worn out, you are smartly pressed!

We’ve got Whales – East Timor 21st November 2006

2006-11-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

A great day at K41, one of my favourite dive sites in East Timor. We spotted at least 3 humpback whales fairly close to the shore. Watching the coastline we saw them come up 4 times and the last time after a huge spout of water we saw the tail of one of the whales as it dived, awesome! The next day at Bobs Rock we had another humpback much closer to shore this time. People are reporting seeing them now on an almost daily basis from the shores of Dili itself.

I had dinner with Robbie the other night and he told me with sadness that Miss Millie (his pet goat) had disappeared. Robbie suspects’ foul play as the neighbour was always complaining that the free roaming Miss Millie was ruining his garden by eating all the plants. According to the neighbour Miss Millie was last seen on Saturday trotting up the mountain, but Robbie heard rumours that Millie was tied up in the local village on Friday night, which in Robbie’s mind makes the neighbour the prime suspect. However, Robbie did add that Millie was pregnant and could have gone up the mountain to give birth. I hope this is the case. To be continued…….or not!

We were off to have coffee that night at the Timor Hotel (Dilis’ poshest establishment). Whilst walking from the car to the entrance we heard strange grunting noises from the car park next door. It was the Kiwi army doing a full blown Hukka. Only in East Timor!

I’ve got so used to seeing the military and the UN Police around, I don’t think anything of it any more. I’m even teaching some of the Philippine police to dive. The pool we use is in the Hotel Esplanada which is now the residence of 25 Kiwi police, who are often in the pool late afternoons supping a beer. One of the exercises I have to teach my students is the CESA which involves them swimming slowly from one end of the pool to another on one breath. To make sure they don’t hold their breath or take a sneaky one, I get them to sing whilst doing this, and practice on the surface with a snorkel before doing it underwater. One of my students was unsuccessful on his first attempt so jokingly said ‘Ill have to improve my singing’. This was met by loud applause and cheers and a ‘Yes please mate’ from the surrounding Kiwi police pool mates.

Its great working with different cultures, I’ve discovered that the philippinos ‘Want to be together’ in everything they do. They also like a precise agenda, have all the latest gadgets and adore taking photos of each other. Wayne jokingly asked them several times today if they were sure they were not Japanese.

The 12th of November is Remembrance Day for the massacre at Santa Cruz. In 1991 hundreds of young Timorese marched peacefully to the Santa Cruz cemetery to place flowers on the grave of a student that had been shot dead at the church two weeks before. As they reached the cemetery the Indonesian troops opened fire and mowed them down killing hundreds.

The atmosphere that day was a little tense as the situation here is quite volatile. As we drove to Backpackers that night, the streets were lined with candles, each one of them representing a dead relative or friend. It was quite eerie seeing all these tiny lights on streets that would normally be completely dark as Dili does not have street lights. When we got to Backpackers we found the restaurant closed as the staff were scared of the crowd on the street, but as I watched the kids walk by a couple were playing guitar and the kids were singing Timorese songs, in peace.

The central areas for trouble in Dili are the IDP camps, especially the ones in central Dili, the Airport, outside Hotel Timor, the hospital and the Obrigado Barracks. New IDP camps have been built further out of the city, but the only way you can get the IDP’s to move to these new sites is withdraw supplies. You cannot force them to move as it would be against their human rights. So supplies of food and water to the old sites were stopped on the 16th. Of course this transition would never be without its problems and yesterday the 20th, came a turning point in the troubles, the first Malai was murdered. It was a Brazilian priest on his way to the hospital. Who knows what is going to happen next and what the repercussions of this will be.

Johnny the tooth is back! – East Timor 1st November 2006

2006-11-19T03:36:00.000-08:00

Wayne and Ann came in excitedly the other day to grab some money. ‘We’ve found Johnny the Tooth’ they exclaimed’, which is probably the single best piece of news we have had in a long time. Johnny was our mobile off licence and cigarette vendor with a pitch right opposite the dive centre, he disappeared in May when all the troubles started and we haven’t seen him since. Wayne and Ann found him at the Pertamina Market selling a meagre 3 packets of clove cigarettes (popular with the locals). Ann bought a packet and slipped Johnny $40. Johnny in his usual way, didn’t smile (probably due to the absence of teeth), but gave Ann a nod of his head while his eyes were like saucers.

The day after ‘The Sweeney’ scene, we were woken at 6.50am but shouting outside. We got up to see a guy from the East being frogmarched into the ‘Western’ village next to us. The guy was driving along in a taxi which was stoned by the village, he then tried to make a run for it when he was caught, frogmarched to the village, beaten up and stabbed. Luckily it wasn’t fatal. This apparently was in retaliation for the similar treatment the Xefi (Chief) of the village had received from Easterners and who is now recovering in hospital.

Rumours are rife around Dili. The press report about two headless bodies was apparently not true. However, two bodies were found under Pertimina Jetty (one of our dive sites!) on Friday. The rumour going around the local Timorese is that they were shot and dumped by the Australian Forces which is totally ridiculous. However it has sparked a warning that Australians are now being targeted so be extra vigilant. So we have stuck the British flag on our cars!

It doesn’t help the situation that Ice is being supplied to the gangs of young boys. Not only are they, bored, unemployed and resentful, they are now high as kites and think that they are invincible, just like the hero’s in the pirate copies of Rambo and the Terminator that are pedalled on the streets.

Electricity cuts are becoming more and more frequent in Dili, up to three hours at a time, which you don’t need coming into wet season where its hotter due to humidity. Also due to the season, mosquitoes are becoming more prevalent and in a country of malaria and dengue fever, and electric fan is a must, to keep them at bay. The electricity cuts are due to generators that are overdue servicing but mainly illegal bypassing of the meters. Electricity, like most things here, is very expensive, so increasing numbers are rerouting their electricity so its not going through the meter, hence some of the generators are trying to work at 75% over capacity and have to be periodically shut down. In a land with no legal consequence at the moment, the attitude is ‘Well everyone is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?’ It’s a bit like downloading music from the internet; it doesn’t seem illegal if you get away with it. Two nights ago we had another 3 hour cut. As soon as power came back on the CD player started up again with Santana’s – Turn your lights on! Freaky!

Bureaucracy here is not helping progress; it takes me back to my previous career working with the UK Government. Everything has to go through a paper trail and the sign off procedure for any spending is arduous and often the transaction cost ends up being more than the purchase. Well here it’s even worse, and universally they seem to have adopted the same bureaucratic model but with differing spending limits. I know of one organisation that anything over $5 needs to be signed off by the chief manager and then anything over $350 needs to be signed off by a committee. No wonder progress is slow.

One of my favourite ever students left last week. Tatyana was from Kazakhstan and worked for the National Red Cross in Timor. The warehouses when she arrived we chocker-block with supplies ‘In case of an emergency’, well what do you call this then! The hoarding mentally resulted in wasting money, they had a load of footballs that had been in the warehouse so long they had deflated and the plastic perished. They had spare parts for cars such as filters that were totally corroded because instead of using the oldest first, they had used the new ones, and hoarded the old ones ‘for an emergency’, duh! They even had spare parts for cars they no longer had. The cars were given to the hospital, but they couldn’t give the spare parts directly to the hospital because of their monetary value, they had to give them to the government who in turn could give them to the hospital! And I used to criticise UK Government procurement procedures.

When Grant first told me his girlfriend Tatyana was coming to East Timor and she wanted to learn to dive, he also warned me that she would be a challenge as up until 2 years previously she wouldn’t even put her head in the water. What Grant didn’t emphasise however, was that Tatyana was a pretty determined lady, so several extra confined water sessions, a couple of abortive open water dives and an ear infection later, I certified Tatyana as a PADI Open Water Diver. She even went on to do a couple of Adventure dives with me, including Deep, towards her Advanced course. The great thing about Tatyana, was as soon as she managed to get underwater, she adored it. And she was constantly smiling with delight underwater; it’s was a pleasure just seeing her face. On her third and fourth open water dives at Dili Rock we saw a large white tip reef shark. Not sure how she would react, I checked with her first before going down to see it; she loved it, not phased in the slightest.

Tatyana and Grant had a leaving do at one of Dili’s beachside restaurants. They set up a laptop and projector and showed all their East Timor photos set to music while we had pre-dinner drinks as the sun set in the background. It created a fantastic atmosphere. The theme of the party was ‘Blue’, as they were both feeling blue to be leaving. I struggled to find respectable blue clothing in my limited wardrobe, but managed it. Tatyana had painted blue teardrop on her face and Grant made a fashion statement by painting his toenails blue.

After dinner Tatyana made speeches and handed out traditional gifts that she had bought with her from Kazakhstan. After presenting gifts to her work colleagues, she said ‘I would like to give this last gift to someone who has made such a difference to my life in East Timor, my dive instructor’. She then gave me a traditional tapestry pencil case/purse from Kazakhstan. I was really touched, but that’s what’s nice about working here rather than a resort, you get to know your students, spend what time you need with them and see them improve and gain confidence.

We went to Calamity Jane’s leaving do a couple of weeks ago. Jane was head of disaster management and got the nickname calamity Jane, because every time she went abroad for a seminar etc. there seemed to be a calamity in East Timor, cyclone warning, earthquake warning, civil unrest etc. She also had the nickname of Lady Jane as she was the most stylishly dressed woman in Dili. Satin shoes with kitten heels are not the most practical attire for dusty, potholed Dili, but Jane didn’t care. She was leaving to go to a new job in Barbados, so Wayne spent 2 hours downloading the song ‘Woah, were going to Barbados!’ (Yes, our internet is really that slow). Wayne played the song at the party (after the nightly electricity cut), much to Jane’s delight and Rob’s annoyance as she proceeded to play it constantly for the next 24 hours

Thursday was a UN holiday so we took a load of divers over on the boat to the Island of Atuaoro On the way we saw dolphins playing and jumping out of the water followed by a pod of pilot whales. Yesterday we were at K41 diving and the snorkellers had seen a couple of humpback whales, so on the way back we were scouring the sea for signs of them. Finally we saw a water spout so pulled off the road to another dive site, Secret Garden. After a few minutes we saw the water spout again and the whale rise out of the water. It was far off in the distance so you couldn’t see any detail, but it was my first humpback, and it’s great to know they are out there this season in East Timor’s waters.

Bagpipes and Guns - East Timor 25th Oct 2006

2006-10-26T02:29:00.000-07:00

The British Embassy, Dili, East Timor closed Friday the 13th of October 2006. It was really a very sad occasion because the staff there have been brilliant through the crisis, and like all Brits, we get very patriotic at times. They couldn’t find a Brit to play the bagpipes, so a young Ozzy soldier arrived with his mate, laid down his machine gun and took out his bagpipes. Then in full army uniform including flack jacket, he played the bagpipes as the British flag was lowered! A surreal moment in East Timor again! The ceremony was concluded with champagne and a Union Jack cake, cut by Jamon (the British Ambassadors husband), because it was his birthday that day also.

I’ve been trying to teach Jamon to dive, which is interesting as he is Thai and doesn’t read English, so the theory is a challenge as Thai looks like worms to me. When I asked him ‘What is the most important rule of scuba diving?’ to which the answer should be ‘Never hold your breath’, he thought about it carefully and after about 3 minutes he said ‘I know, no alcohol before diving!’

Another surreal moment happened in the Esplanada pool where I was teaching a load of kids Bubblemaker. Two Blackhawk helicopters swooped low over the hotel and the kids all started waving. This is what 8 year olds in Dili have got used to!

The Australian Defence Force has been heavily criticised for taking their APV’s (Armoured Patrol Vehicles), into the sea to test the seals. Stupidly they took them in at low tide off of the main beach which is strewn with coral, you would think they would have thought about this, instead heaps of coral was damaged and the soldiers in question are receiving counselling for their inappropriate behaviour! To make matters worse, the beach, Christo Rei is Dili’s favourite snorkelling beach because of the calm water and beautiful coral.

It’s apparently whale season, but I haven’t seen any yet, but we are starting to see quite a few sharks. Two of my students saw a 2½ meter white tip reef shark on both Open Water 3 and 4. Spoilt for the rest of their diving days, now nothing will seem as good, until they see their first whale shark or manta that is.

The trouble here in Dili is escalating and for the first time in 6 months it’s on our doorstep. A report was issued about the unlawful killing of several policemen and the recommendations of actions to go with it, which included charging several prominent figures with murder. Everyone was holding their breath waiting for this report to come out knowing that it would have repercussions.

The trouble now seems to be throughout Dili including outside our dive centre. We watched little scroats lob stones at motorbikes and cars as they drove past, unfortunately they have a whole beach full of ammunition. In retaliation a taxi drove past and it’s passenger fired an ambon arrow at the main ring leader who was holding his child at the time. Luckily, the arrow missed, but all hell broke loose with the village boys screaming down the road with rocks. A few minutes later, it was like a scene out of The Sweeney, GNR, AFP and UN Police with flashing lights everywhere. Of course the ringleader protested his innocence, he was minding his own business, carrying his toddler at his sisters/aunties/wife’s vegetable stall when unprovoked, the gang from East fired an arrow at him. Of course the ringleader failed to mention to the police that he had been throwing stones for the last two days and actually was the organiser of a gang of stone throwers. The vegetable stall is actually doubling up as lookout point and a bunker, and the boys are starting to get clever by changing the colour of their T-shirts as soon as the forces arrive.

The AFP came to talk to us, but we are reluctant to get involved as so far we have remained neutral. If we get involved the business could be targeted which could put ourselves and especially, our staff in danger. However, it is getting incredibly boring, it’s so futile. Most the time it is just wanton vandalism, but for the first time since I’ve been here I feel that I could accidentally get caught in the crossfire.

There have been some more serious incidents though, two decapitated, limbless bodies were found in sacks at the Komoro market. Well that’s how the press reported it. Speculation is that it was this incident that has sparked all the trouble down the beach road where we live. The airport is a no go area again, they even had to close it intermittently over the last few days. There is a very large IDP camp at the Airport which has always been rife with trouble.

Today the trouble kicked off again right outside our gates, an Eastener was chased into the sea by rock throwers. The helicopter circling above had seen it and the police arrived in force with riot shields, pepper spray, batons and guns filled with bean bag shots. They soon let their presence be known. I overheard one female officer shout ‘Now fuck off you little shits!’ Feisty lady! After they had dispersed the crowd and issued warnings, three of them leant against the wall opposite and reapplied their suntan lotion, one even managed to squirt the bottle down his trousers, oops!

The IDP camps are still throughout the city and at the Metinaro barracks, looking more and more permanent every time we go past them. A huge problem will be when rainy season starts. We have already had one downpour and when it rains here, it really rains. The IDP camps are going to turn into mud baths rife with disease through poor or no sanitation and mosquito borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. What a mess! But they are still too scared to go home.

Hiawatha in Timor – East Timor 14th October 2006

2006-10-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

There is a great loss in Timor, The British Embassy is finally closing, which is really sad as they were fantastic during the middle of the troubles here. We were cordially invited to two parties at the British Embassy this week, the Brits closure party and the general closure party, both were nice events.

I’m trying to teach the British Ambassadors husband to dive at the moment, his name is Jamon and he’s Thai and to say he is eccentric is probably an understatement. We told him that drinking alcohol was not allowed before a dive, so day one he came round with two bottles of wine to drink after the dive! At the first British Embassy 'do' we walked into the residence and were greeted by Jamon in full native American Indian dress, complete with headdress, chest jewellery and feather earrings. But with Jamon, you don’t think anything of it apart from it was a bit bizarre in the British Embassy

When I took Jamon for his first dive I went to Dili Rock and left Nelson in charge of the truck. When I came out of the water there were two Timorese guys standing by the truck staring stony faced at me. Nelson explained that they were from the West (Nelson is from the East) and they had the truck key and wanted money. I immediately picked up my mobile and threatened them with the police. They gave the key back to Nelson whilst screaming at him in Tetum, and eventually retreated to the other side of the road. As we were packing up the gear and I noticed that Nelson had got out the spanner and screwdriver from the spares kit, apparently one of the guys was carrying a knife! Nelson asked me to take the other route out of the dive site and picked up a large stone before he got in the car. Luckily the incident came to nothing, but quite shocking later when I realised I’d been involved in an attempted armed robbery!

The stoning incidents are getting worse here in Dili. A friend had a stone lobbed through his car window as he was driving over the Komoro bridge. Luckily our Drive truck is so old and tatty that it no way looks like an official vehicle, well that’s what we are hoping anyway. In a land with no insurance, all damage has to be paid for out of your own pocket

On the diving front we have good news, there was only one commercial fishing company operating off of the coast of Com. It was a Thai fishing company that was rumoured to be over fishing their quota by miles, anyway they got caught shark fin fishing a few months after their contract started. Their boat has been impounded and hopefully the government will think twice before letting another commercial fishing company fish in Timorese waters.

Wayne and Ann have started a new club called the Local Characters Club. They felt left out because they didn’t have a pass around their neck which all the UN and NGO’s do. So Ann has made official neck passes with photos and the number of years of service. To qualify for this club you must be a resident of Timor for five years or more off of your own dollar (investing in the country}. Once you have this pass, Local characters are entitled to:-

1 Park where they like
2 Enter any building (as they probably built it)
3 Drive whilst over-refreshed
4 Express controversial views or spit the dummy in public any time they like
5 Undertake to look after any other Local Character (Regardless of previous blues)

The last rule is because half the time the Local Characters are not speaking to half of the other Local Characters. All Local Character passes expire in May 2007, the date of the next Timorese election

Miss Millie goes on Holiday – East Timor 19th September 2006

2006-09-18T23:12:00.000-07:00

Wayne and Ann went on holiday last Monday leaving me to run things here. Only hours after they had left there was a stone throwing incident outside the dive centre so I called the Joint Task Force. Within 10 minutes I had a bus load of GNR and 2 APV’s rumbling outside my gates. I was impressed, I made that happen! Of course the stone throwers had already long gone..

Before Ann and Wayne left I got Nelson to write down the staff schedule so I knew who was coming in when, and explained that I needed their help to make sure we had cover at all times. The next day the morning staff was late and the afternoon staff didn’t turn up! Apparently he got confused about the schedule, which I could understand if it was new but it turned out it was the same schedule as they have been using for the last 2 years! I think it was a case of ‘The Boss is away so what can I get away with?’ I soon put a stop to that.

I had dinner with Robbie last week, he’s off to Thailand for a month so Miss Millie (his goat) is also going on holiday to Baucau (an Eastern District of East Timor). Millie is going to be transported by car, her first road trip. We had visions of Miss Millie sitting in the front of a Pink Cadillac, donned in sunglasses and neckscarf like Penelope Pitstop. I have very bizarre conversations with Robbie!

The UN have upped the security level again due to the increase of incidents around town, so no UN staff are allowed outside of Dili unless they get prior clearance. What with that and the wind we have been having this week, it’s not great for the dive business. Jurgen text me yesterday with a security update ‘Rioting between 100 people on Hera Road, Becora. Spears in use’ to which I replied ‘ So what, I have 3 dogs, a chicken on the roof and a chick that’s fled into the house, I’ve a bigger riot going on here’. Doris is an absolute monster when it comes to chickens. Why on earth do the stupid animals come into the garden when they can see the dogs?

I’ve become the mummy instructor around here. My PADI Bubblemaker’s are increasing, now it’s the talk of the school. I had one little girl aged 8 called Georgina, who was adorable. Just before we went in the water she said to me ‘I’m soooooo excited!’ Then when we finished swimming through hoops, playing with the underwater torpedo and doing handstands in the pool, she said ‘Thank you very much, that was so much fun’. But the best bit was when I went to sign her diving logbook, complete with fishy stickers of course! She had written ‘This is the best day of my life’, my heart completely melted.

Concert for Peace - East Timor 6th September 2006

2006-09-06T01:13:00.000-07:00

We went to a great concert sponsored by Arte Morris in Dili this week; it was a real Wembley Stadium affair. The stage was the presidential palace which is a wide, two storey building and has a load of arches which were lit up as the sun set on the beach opposite. It had a fantastic atmosphere, drinking Tiger beer while sitting on the harbour wall, listening to Timorese sing for peace and unity while the sun turns a glorious red as it drops below the horizon. As soon as the sun dropped though, the audience disappeared back to their homes, to scared to be out at night. I dropped a student back to her hotel last night because taxis don’t run at night anymore, I counted 5 cars and absolutely no people on the streets, it was like a ghost town, mind you it was Tuesday, and Dili never really roars with life at night anyway.

Part of the reason for the empty streets, are the incidents of violence and burning that have recently reared their head again, mainly stone throwing and arson, but there was one report of shooting in the city centre. Many associate this new outbreak with Major Alfredo Reinado escaping from jail. Major Alfredo, who is labelled in the press as the ‘former rebel leader’, was arrested the day after the arms amnesty expired because he didn’t hand his weapons in. He was put in prison under Australian Defence Force and Australian Federal Police guard and on the 30th of August along with 56 other prisoners, escaped. Rumours make it sound like he simply walked out right under the AFP’s noses. Either way the Ozzies have a lot of explaining to do, rather embarrassing!

We have had ‘The Mercy’ hospital ship in the harbour over the last week, apparently it visits East Timor every eight months or so. The view from the dive centre was this huge white ship with red crosses emblazoned on the side, next to which was an Australian battleship, its amazing how you think nothing of this sort of sight in East Timor, you just get used to it.

While it was here, they set up an emergency dental surgery at Dr Dan’s clinic. Ann went along with her tooth problem and joined 30 or so East Timorese waiting for treatment, but unfortunately that day they were only doing extractions. The one thing we could change though when The Mercy was here was our dive briefings. ‘The nearest decompression chamber is situated on that bloody great big boat in the harbour’, rather than Darwin or Bali. It’s left now to go back to Ache, Indonesia.

Occasionally you get moments where you think ‘Only in East Timor!’ We had one the other day whilst sitting outside the dive centre on the terrace, the sun on our backs, drinking coffee and listening to the water lapping on the beach opposite. Our moment was broken by loud speaker driven western music, not something you hear every day. An army truck with speakers on top pulled up outside the dive centre and with music blaring started handing out leaflets to Timorese. It was a surreal moment; it reminded us of Apocalypse Now. To make it even more surreal Ann encountered the same truck canvassing outside Dr Dan’s later in the week, but this time it was playing ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Rolling Stones, very appropriate.

Begging is becoming more and more of a problem around town. I stopped for lunch at the Terrace café and was immediately pounced on by an enterprising young boy who offered me security for my car. This did make me laugh as we always leave the dive truck open because everything that is not nailed down has already been pinched. The last time we locked one side door, they would-be thieves broke the little side window, even though the drivers side door was open and the other little side window was already missing. We now have through car ventilation! This is my life after the company BMW! Needless to say, I declined his offer and told him to go back to school.

On a personal front, good news, I’ve got a new 32 page passport. Or should I say a 25 page passport after you take out all the pages they have used for language translations etc. What a swizz, £100 for 25 pages, its hardly going to last me 10 years, the last one only lasted 3 years before it was full. When I asked about 48 page passport I was told they were not available until next year because of the new biometric system they have just introduced, great!

Other good news is the restaurant next door is now Thai, and very good. It was a Philippine restaurant before and very variable, you would order something one day and really enjoy it, then 2 days later you would order it again and it would be completely different. Phillipeno’s eat some strange parts of animals as well, so the Thai menu is much more appealing. I think any westerner would chance Prawn Phad Thai from a menu rather than Crispy Chicken Skin and Ass.

Business wise, I’ve just had my busiest two weeks since I’ve been here. A mixture of guided dives, Open Water students, EFR classes and Bubblemakers. Jurgen returned to East Timor with full dive kit for his two young daughters who are keen to do what Mummy and Daddy do. We had a fantastic time in the pool with an underwater torpedo, plastic rings, a hula hoop and a rubber snake! (Nandini’s – aged 8). Ann has made some fantastic certificates for the kids where we scan in a photograph of them in the water with scuba gear on; it’s the talk of the school. I’ve taught 10 year olds Open Water before but they have always had English as their first language, so teaching an Austrian/German and a Norwegian is a new challenge to me, even though their English is excellent. But the big reward is the smiles, especially when I hand them their own log book and they can choose their own fish sticker to put in it. The best £1.99 I ever spent in Hounslow High Street.

With the influx of aid we have some new NGO’s here. (Non Government Organisations). Obviously these Organisations are from all parts of the world, so sometimes their acronyms don’t translate so well into English. Here are just a few classics for your amusement:-

FOKUPERS- Komite de Unidade National Timorense, FAT – Don’t know what that stands for, and the best one, KUNT – also don’t know the translation.

Imagine a meeting with those 3 together!

Wot No Electricity! - East Timor 25th August 2006

2006-09-06T01:06:00.000-07:00

Its been a while, but take that as good news as things are calming down :-)

All was quiet in East Timor for a few weeks and then just before I went to Bali the stone throwing started again. We were at Dili Rock just kitting up for a dive when an Aussie policeman stopped for a chinwag and recounted a story from the previous evening:-

He received a call from the IDP camp near the airport reporting some trouble, so when they arrived a male Timorese IDP was complaining that they were not safe because they had no security. The first policeman then asked him where his security was, the man replied ‘I don’t know’, to which the second policeman replied ‘You do know, you stabbed him yesterday!’ If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny.

There are certain things you get used to here that would be totally unacceptable in a western world, like electricity cuts. In East Timor, electricity is incredibly expensive, as are most things. To purchase electricity in Dili you need to prepay at an office in central Dili where they issue with a computer generated code to punch into your meter. The problem is when you try to pay for electricity when the whole of Dili is having a power cut, their computers don’t work, because there is no electricity! Only in East Timor do you shrug your shoulders at this and say ‘Welcome to Timor’.

When you arrive in East Timor with a fresh pair of eyes, you notice things that are different, and then you get used to the place. One newcomer pointed out today that there is not one traffic light in the whole of East Timor, 6 months I’ve been driving around and never noticed that.

Any newcomers to Dili now, unfortunately won’t get a great first impression of the country. After getting off the plane in the grounds of the airport, you pass Aussie army tents on which some bored soldier has put up an Australian flag and cardboard signs saying ‘Casa De Mutley’, ‘Diligaf’ and ‘Sydney → A Bloody long way!’ After going through baggage reclaim your first sight will be an Australian APV, behind which is a huge IDP camp, ‘Welcome to East Timor’. In truth though in the past few weeks the IDP camps are getting smaller as people are returning home and there are no longer any road blocks.

There are however, still outbreaks of stone throwing and arson in the city, which appear to be organised, all going off at the same time. We were having a BBQ the other night when Major Wayne and Major Sergeant (Yes, he really is called that!) suddenly got a call and had to go. A good excuse for leaving a party. I arrived back from diving last week to find 12 police cars outside the dive centre. Some local lads were throwing stones so the ‘Joint Task Force’ was called. (No, they don’t deliver Whacky Backy!). Talk about rapid reaction force, although 12 combined Malaysian, Australian and Portuguese police vehicles seems a little excessive.

Ann is teaching the local kids on the veggie stall opposite some words in English, they now can count out your change in English and say thank you. Unfortunately they can also say ‘One Dollar’ and have started to beg from the Malai, a habit we are trying to discourage, but its getting more widespread as more troops and UN are pouring in and don’t know any better. You can’t blame the kids if they can make a quick buck.

I had to go to Bali recently to get a new passport because after 3 years mine was full. I had a choice of going to the honorary consulate in Bali or the British Embassy in Jakarta, a tough choice that one! Bali is wonderful, a beautiful scenic island which is magical and musical, such a refreshing change from East Timor which can be tough going at times. Of course I dived; you can’t go to Bali without doing The Liberty wreck at Tulamben which was fabulous for really unusual critters such as pigme seahorses, nudibranch, and harlequin ghost pipefish, as well as big fish such as Napoleon Wrasse. The unusual thing about Tulamben is the local women of the village carry the gear and the tanks, up to three at a time, one on each shoulder and one on their head. Their posture puts Miss Jean Brodie to shame. For this they get 40 cents per tank from the dive centres which the village has used to create a cultural centre in the village. But it extends further than the women because the men police the reef to ensure that any fishing is done on the outer reefs which are not accessible to divers, so the inner reefs are not damaged by fishing equipment and the fish are not scared off. It’s a great scheme.

I also dived with H and Camilla who own Global Aquatic. I had to write a thank you email to them both, Camilla for the diving and H for the hangovers, they are both really good fun. Camilla took me to Manta Ray cove where surprise, surprise, I saw my first Manta Rays, two of them playing above us, awesome. I told Camilla she was now my best friend forever!

I had a brilliant time in Bali with good company, good diving and good food. It was hard getting back on the plane to East Timor, just like the normal feeling when you go on holiday and then have to go back to work. However, things are starting to get busy, new faces coming through the door and some old ones returning. It’s amazing how a break can recharge your batteries and get you enthusiastic again.

Lock up your livestock – East Timor 24th July 2006

2006-07-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

We have now decided we prefer the Ozzy troops to the Kiwis. The Ozzy’s have browned off a bit and look less like lobsters and one Kiwi soldier was rude to me. So much that Wayne had to defend my honour. I’d pulled up to a road block in Hera with Wayne driving the car behind me. A Kiwi soldier was manning the block and kept me waiting with no eye contact. This is not a big deal, but they are usually very friendly. He then asked for ID, so I replied I didn’t have to show him ID because it wasn’t the law in East Timor to carry it. Puzzled, he tried to clarify his question, ‘So you don’t have ID? I told him I did but it was in the back of the truck and I didn’t have to show it to him, (if it had been to hand I would have given it to him). He then took his time check the truck and plates and finally gave me the thumbs up signal, so off I drove. Unbeknown to me, behind my truck he made a rather rude hand gesture then stormed up to Wayne’s car and called me a ‘Feken Betch’ (please excuse my Kiwi accent). Astonished Wayne replied ‘She’s not a Feken Betch, she works for me!’ To defend his words the Kiwi replied ‘She wouldn’t show me ID’, to which Wayne replied ‘She’s quite in her rights not to, we are under Timorese law not martial law’. Disgruntled the soldier let Wayne through. They are so bored; at least it will give him something to talk about in the mess tonight.

It’s a really fine balance when you bring troops in from different countries and cultures, they are bored out of their brains, and don’t know anything about the country or their traditions. The Malaysian troops have been brought to our attention as Shane was driving through a roadblock and got searched. He spoke to the troops in Bahasa which they understand and claimed he had no weapons in his truck. Being a forester he didn’t think that the machete under his seat and the saw and shears in the back of his truck were weapons. Of course when the Malaysian troops found them Shane realised that they could be seen in a different light. The Malaysians kept repeating that machetes can kill people and then asked if Shane was their friend? Shane immediately thought they wanted money, but no, they wanted girls. Obviously Shane refused to be their pimp. So much for good little Muslim boys.

The Catholic church has a huge influence here, so obviously there is no sex before marriage, no contraception and they have made prostitution illegal. You may as well stick your head in the sand! Prostitution has been around since the roman times, and just because its illegal doesn’t mean it will stop, all you will see is the rise of HIV and backstreet abortions. Women here are baby making machines, even when they neither can afford it in monetary terms or physically. The First Lady has set up a very worthy charity which encourages mothers to breast feed, a natural but not foolproof contraception.

Obviously with the Catholic influence, over-population is a problem which the Indonesians tried to eradicate by injecting contraception chips into unsuspecting Timorese women during the occupation. Human guinea pigs! It’s reported that 70% of the population is under 22, hence high levels of unemployment. Bored and poor young men are never a good mixture when you look at the recent troubles here.

With the return on the UN, GNR, AFP (Awfully fat police!) and troops from various countries, and old problem has been recently reported by Lindsey Murdock of the Sydney Morning Herald (who let the dogs out fame, for anyone who has been following this saga). He recently wrote an article regading at least 20 children born to UN peacekeepers that have been abandoned with no financial means of support, whilst their mothers have been exiled from their communities. He also wrote ‘In early 2001, two soldiers were sent home with injured penises after allegedly attempting sexual intercourse with goats’. Forget lock up your daughters, lock up your livestock! I’d better tell Robbie to make sure Millie (his goat) is safe.

I’ve heard a story about two Jordanese soldiers that raped a little boy here in 2001. They were escorted home by the King of Jordan and shot dead the moment they stepped off the plane. That’s the punishment for that type for crime in Jordan.

There are still thousands of people in IDP camps around Dili, still too scared to go home. I hear the argument that these camps are too permanent and they don’t encourage people to move back. But if you can imagine me, camping out in Datchet train station, too scared to return to my 3 bed semi in case Ana and Evan beat me up and torch my house. You can’t can you?

On the diving front, this weekend we ran a boat trip to the island of Atauro. We had two boats full but the weather was rough so we had a few seasick people. When I briefed Nelson and Jose on the Friday, both their faces fell when I mentioned the boat. This was not surprising as the last time both their faces were a horrible shade of green through seasickness. I assured them that this time we would give them seasick tablets, but unfortunately they didn’t work and both of them sported the same green pallor for most of the day. I don’t think they will trust me again.

The diving itself was incredible; the first dive was Manta Ray cove. I can honestly say I have never done a wall dive with such pristine virgin coral. The colours were spectacular with the morning shards of light streaming through caves and crevices, it assailed your senses, so much that you didn’t know where to look and couldn’t take it all in. With 30 meters visibility and a large Napoleon Wrasse, it’s got to be in my top 10 dives of all time.

The Pizza is still hot – East Timor 30th June 2006

2006-06-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

In some western countries, pizza delivery companies give you a guarantee that if the pizza isn’t delivered within 30 minutes then you get the food for free. Given Dili's usual road conditions, potholes, chickens, dogs, goats, vendor carts and taxis crawling at 20kmph, this is a good achievement at the best of times.

We have had nearly a week of demonstrations where the whole place has been remnant of Notting Hill Festival. Thousands of trucks crammed with people, painted faces, Timor flags flying, music blaring, singing and chanting, horns honking, and banners everywhere. We even had 2 truck loads all wearing ‘I Love Xanana’ T-shirts, with Xanana’s face printed on the front; these are definitely not available in the shops. The slow convoy would crawl by with trucks of people as far as the eye could see and yet Flip still pulled up in the middle of all this with hot pizzas! That’s service for you.

East Timor – The land of surprises; this should be the country’s new strap line. They are not always good surprises, but you are always surprised. Finally we get the announcement we have all been waiting for, but it wasn’t Mari Alkatiri that resigned it was Ramos Horta the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Defence, we were gobsmacked! Mari Alkatiri did resign his post as Prime Minister the day after but remains an MP to deal with the budget matters until the election of the next government.

All the protesters so far have been from the West. There is still a strong West/East thing going on in the city. One of our staff was punched in the face for being the only Easterner in his village and ended up sleeping in the classroom because he was too scared to return to his house. The next day he returned to his home town. This put a really bitter taste on all the celebrations, the Prime Minister resigning is not going to stop this racism, especially when the guys from the East return to Dili and find their houses burned down, there will be more revenge attacks

Ann and Wayne were at the Hotel Dili when it all kicked off again. Wayne called me to tell me to stay put as there was a repeat of stone throwing, fighting and 3 fires nearby the hotel. Gino was a bit concerned as he has his gas company next to the hotel and if the fires got too close this could be a major disaster. Again in the midst of all this, 12 year old boys throwing stones and lighting fires, Australian troops fully geared up, cameramen and press running around, up pulls Flip with his Pizza delivery!

Another morning we were woken at 6 a.m. by yet another noisy protest. This time though the trucks were waving Portuguese flags not Timorese which was confusing. Portugal had won their game in the World Cup! And of course with the time difference these guys had just seen the match live.

The Philippine restaurant next door has finally opened again, so we popped in for a drink to show them some local support. The girls that work there are from the hills and gave us good news about our housekeeper Maria who disappeared two months ago. She is safe and well but is stuck up in the hills with no money. Ann is now trying to work out a way to get a message to her that her job is still open and send up her wages so that she can return to Dili.

This whole place is ringing with acronyms; it takes you a while to work out what someone is talking about. East Timor has the AFP, the GNR, NGO’s, APV’s, IDP’s, the UN and the RedX. Then you have a completely different language with the journos; ABC, shoot, feed, wingman. It reminds me of working for SAP again!

I’ve added another song to the list, ‘Should I stay or should I go now? – The Clash’. Seriously though, we are starting to get a few divers walking through the door with the return of the essential UN staff. Plus after sitting it out this long watching history being made and never feeling personally in danger, it would be crazy to leave now, so I’m staying put.

Footnote
ABC - Australian Broadcasting Company
AFP - Australian Federal Police
APV - Armoured Patrol Vehicle
GNR - Portuguese Republican National Guard
IDP - Internally Displaced Person
NGO - Non Government Organisation
RedX - The Red Cross
UN - United Nations

And Pigs Might Fly – East Timor 25th June 2006

2006-06-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

Terrible news! Ginger Da Pig is dead! Robbie the adoptive owner is launching a full scale investigation into the case because Ginger disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Robbie went to ‘One More Bar’ where Millie the goat and Ginger Da Pig were housed, to take them for their daily walk around town. When he found Ginger he was basking in the sun, trotters outstretched, so Robbie assumed he was asleep, it was only later it occurred to him that pigs normally roll in wet mud and lie in the shade to keep themselves cool, they don’t normally sunbathe. Thinking nothing of it at the time he duly took Millie for her walk and then returned the next day to repeat the ritual, only the next day Ginger had disappeared.

Obviously concerned as to Gingers whereabouts, Robbie started questioning the staff. The first answer he got was Ginger had been bitten by a snake, yeah right! Where Millie and Ginger are housed there are also ducks that would have created alarming if there was a snake around, so Robbie probed further. The same witness then said the pig had died of starvation! Now given that this is a 50lb pig with enough meat on him to feed a family for a week or two, it was very unlikely that Ginger had starved to death in 15 hours. Also there was no body to verify this claim. Apparently Ginger had been taken away and buried, yeah right again! In a country where rice is in short supply, a 50lb pig is not going to be given a dignified funeral without passing through the bodies of several Timorese first.

Getting increasingly incensed, Robbie started to question the kitchen staff, their explanation was that Ginger had been bitten by a crocodile! At this point of the story I retorted ‘Yeah, and Pigs might fly’, which had us both laughing as it was as feasible an explanation to Gingers demise as any other that Robbie had heard.

In East Timor, the Timorese are very superstitious about crocodiles; they have this ongoing folk tale about an albino crocodile that terrorises fishermen. We tried to imagine a crocodile walking up the beach, across a main road, over a park area, and then scaling a 6ft fence to bite Ginger. Needless to say the vision didn’t work. The Timorese language is very basic, not having many descriptive words, so a headache is ‘Big stone in head’ in Timorese. So maybe a small crocodile was actually an iguana, but hardly likely to kill a 50lb pig.

So Inspector Robbie is no further forward in his investigations as without a body there can be no autopsy to conclude the cause of death. Was Ginger murdered or died of natural causes, if he was murdered was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the lead pipe or was it the Timorese chef? I don’t think we will ever know.

Over the last couple of days we have had massive protests in Dili, thousands of people in Dili town centre all shouting ‘Go Alkatiri’. They are not supporting him; they all want the Prime Minister Alkatiri to resign. He has been linked with supplying arms to civilians to take out anyone who opposes him, a claim he obviously vehemently denies. We were returning from a dive at Dili Rock, much to the amusement of the Malaysian troops as the dive site is between two of their road blocks. As we were driving back, more and more trucks of people joined us on the road, women and children included, all singing and honking their horns on the way to the government building. I’ve just watched them return from the protest, a motorcycle convoy waving the East Timor flag following by trucks and microlets with bodies hanging off everywhere. I thought I’d seen the most people possible on one microlet (minibus) in Cambodia. But this beats it, there must have been 30 people crammed on one. The announcement regarding Alkatiri was supposed to have been yesterday, but due to the protest they delayed it until today (still waiting). I hope it doesn’t drag on too long though, as when a crowd that big gets hot and bored, young lads get restless and that’s when the sale of matches skyrockets.

There are still thousands of families in refugee camps. As well as food and water, they have been given soap, shampoo and rather spacious, robust tents. Unfortunately now the camps have a look of permanence about them as the tents are often better than their normal living conditions. Many of the camps are empty during the day as the adults go off to work and the children to school. It seems it’s the night that the people have the most fear of returning to their own homes. There was a rumour of a curfew, but it was only rumour, the Timorese people just don’t want to be on the street at night at the moment.

Needless to say with this activity, the hotels are full of journalists again and Wayne is reemployed as press, so I’m covering the little diving we are doing. A couple of nights ago we returned to the old haunt The Esplanada to meet with some of Wayne’s journalist mates, when in walked two camouflage clad New Zealand soldiers with MP armbands. Ann and I decided that the MP definitely stood for ‘Major Perve’! I think I need to get out more!

Covert Pizza Operations – East Timor 16th June 2006

2006-06-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

We managed to go diving beyond Metinaro today with one of our local staff Nelson, he felt comfortable so it was almost back to normal for our diving day. Wayne and I dived a site he had discovered on an exploratory dive a couple of weeks before, but we hadn’t managed to get back out to it until now. I told Wayne at the end of the dive that he had ruined diving for me as all I look for now is nudibranch and critters, small, rare and unusual stuff. For the unordained, nudibranch are tiny sea slugs that are the Dolce & Gabana of the underwater world, stylish, unusually patterned and often very brightly coloured. Finding a nudibranch is like finding a Tiffany Egg. I saw five varieties on the dive today, three I had never seen before.

To get to the dive site you need to pass through several road blocks. Ann and I decided that the tastiest troops in town were the Kiwis. Unfortunately Australia seem to have sent over every red headed army guy they can find, so the poor pale skinned possums are running around looking like lobsters at the moment. Ann nudged my elbow as we approached a road block the other day and said ‘I don’t fancy yours much!’ This had us giggling as we approached two bewildered looking gun clad Kiwis. When asked if we were carrying any weapons, I told them about my dive knife, but when Ann informed them it was bright pink, they didn’t take it seriously as an offensive weapon.

Today as Wayne and I passed through the roadblock at Hera, the Kiwi boys told us that they would only let us back through if we bought them back some seafood as their ration food was dire. According to one Australian Embassy staff, the troops are not allowed to eat anything but their rations. That’s why we are seeing them in every supermarket then! Apparently, the rule was made back in 2001, when half the Navy went down with food poisoning after eating the local food. That sounds like a bit of an urban legend though!

There are a few people in Dili that are making a killing in these times, the hotels, the car hire companies and Flips Pizza Delivery! Instead of the usual address of 123 The High Street in 20 minutes, it’s, rendezvous at 1800 hours behind the portaloos next to the big tree! Covert pizza delivery! Jim has also been asked to hold a lock-in, where the boys will enter through the back door after their shift without their boss seeing them. This is not for an illicit drinking session though; this is for 6 rounds of bacon and egg and mugs of tea.

More and more clients from the past are turning up. My next open water course could consist of GNR (Portuguese Police). Their boss learned to dive with us the last time he was in East Timor back in 2001 so of course recommended us. Apparently, Army and Police are easy to teach as they are used to taking orders.

Sometimes you hear a song and it takes you straight back to a place and time as if it was yesterday. Well, here’s a few that will always remind me of East Timor:

Talking about a revolution – Tracy Chapman
We’ve got to get out of this place – The Animals
The Boys are back in Town – Thin Lizzy

More and more people are on the streets of Dili now, the military presence is everywhere although there are still many refugee camps. Phone cards are now down to $11 for a $10 card instead of $15. Market stalls are springing up again with an abundance of vegetables and fish and the whole place has a better feel to it.

It’s reported that the majority want the Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri to step down, but he is sticking by his guns, literally! However, there will be the minority that want him in, and in most cases it’s the minority that cause the trouble and unrest. I don’t think it’s over just yet, there may be more to come once some political decisions are made. At the moment it’s a bit of calm before the storm.

Just taking the pig for a walk – East Timor11th June 2006

2006-06-11T02:06:00.000-07:00

We get some eccentric characters turn up at the dive centre here in Dili, East Timor. I first came across Robbie walking his goat outside the supermarket on the beachfront. Robbie is a red haired Glaswegian hairdresser that sports a jaunty beret on this head. He's another veteran of East Timor as he’s a Malai that’s been here for more than five years. As families were evacuated, pets were left behind and Robbie came across a ginger pig wandering around. The owners had left the country so Robbie has adopted the pig and aptly named it Ginger Da Pig. Now he takes both Ginger and Millie the Goat for a walk round town every day.

On the subject of pigs, the Monkey Bar actually has a pig track at the back of the bar and sporadically runs pig races. Now these are serious affairs with piggy forms and odds, previous race wins etc. Even though the whole race lasts for a total of about 15 minutes. Wayne and Ann had a 50% share in a racing pig until they were informed that she had got eaten!

The big story by Channel 7 today was weddings! Because of all the troubles there were weddings scheduled that couldn’t take place, so yesterday they dealt with the backlog and saw 18 couples getting married at one church. It's quite a heartening story given the situation here.

The Australian soldiers are doing a good job trying to restore peace but they came here to fight a war and what they got is vandalising, looting gangs that need policing, so more police are poring in by the day. Wayne was up in the hills at a school that has now been turned into a military base. There were loads of Ozzy soldiers with machine guns guarding the playground which is now a helicopter landing pad. As the Blackhawk took off, kids streamed on to the playground to play in the backwash the helicopter created. The soldiers just had to look on, what could they do, the kids weren’t afraid of their guns, they just wanted to play.

I had a good drive around a couple of days ago; there are a few areas where the torching is obvious because of the freshly burnt out cars. But there are so many burnt out buildings in Dili that it’s hard to tell the old ones from 1999 and the new ones. In 1999 70% of the buildings of East Timor were burnt down as a parting shot from the Indonesians as if to say ‘if we cant have them nor can you!’. I often wondered why people lived in wooden/tin shacks and didn’t rebuild the brick buildings. Apparently the burnt out buildings are left because that’s where atrocities were committed by the Indonesians, rapes, torture and brutal murders. The Timorese believe that these buildings are haunted by the spirits of the people killed in these buildings so will not rebuild them. The Timorese are highly superstitious people.

We stopped at a supermarket and outside were greeted by a truck load of Ozzy soldiers. Not a checkpoint, they were there to stock up on their Pringles. Most of them still wore their packs so were almost too wide to fit down the aisles. It’s a strange sight to see a fully clad soldier with a machine gun in one hand and a plastic shopping basket in the other.

We finally got out diving yesterday, on the boat because its safer for the Timorese staff. Poor Jose was horribly seasick all the way though. I got bitten on the lip by a clownfish, who said nemo is cute. Serves me right for sticking my head too near his anemone! We had a pod of dolphins both on the way out and back, around 60 in the second pod, jumping and doing back flips, fantastic to see. This afternoon Jose said he felt comfortable enough to do shore watch at Dili rock. The Malaysian army have set up a checkpoint nearby so we got half the curious squad asking question after question about diving as we were trying to kit up. Jose got on really well with them and was still chatting away when we emerged an hour later, so much for him being at risk, he had the Malaysian army to protect him.

Plastic Refugees – East Timor 7th June 2006

2006-06-07T00:12:00.000-07:00

The streets of Dili have quietened down, there are still trouble spots but they are mainly in specific areas, not widespread. Outside the Parliament building there are signs thanking the Australians for their intervention but this opinion is mixed. In some areas the gangs are chanting ‘Australians go home’, the Ozzies are disarming people but in some cases this is the only means the Timorese people have of protecting themselves. Wayne came across an Australian woman called Rocky who has run a rehabilitation centre in Dili for years. At the time the Ozzie troops had got all her staff on the floor and were disarming them. Rocky tried to explain to the troops, that her staff were not carrying weapons to loot and fight but to protect themselves and the centre. But the Australian’s job is to disarm and that’s what they did. Wayne met Rocky a couple of days later behind a barricade, when she enquired about her centre Wayne had the unenviable job of explaining that her years of hard work and dedication were burning down as they spoke. The staff could no longer protect the building.

One of the temporary staff in the Esplanada asked Wayne about his house and explained roughly where it was. Wayne checked the area out, now hasn’t got the heart to tell him the whole area is razed to the ground.

There seems to be an East/West divide going on in the city, people cannot return home for fear of being attacked by their neighbours because they were born in the wrong part of the country. We have divers for Saturday but I can’t take any staff out with me because it’s not safe for them. One of the ABC news trucks was attacked with stones on Monday because they stupidly took an East East Timorese interpreter with them to a West East Timorese area.

On the positive side, there was a peaceful march by the rebels yesterday. They delivered a petition to Xanana demanding the resignation of Alkatiri. It went off without incident which is encouraging.

Walking around town you see the refugee camps. These are set up in the squares and churches in the open air housing hundreds of families. What struck me was the use of plastic and nylon, plastic sheeting for sun protection, nylon rope for washing lines, plastic bottles for water, plastic baskets for possessions and plastic bags for food. I saw a young mother washing her baby in a plastic bowl, scooping water over him with a plastic cup. The only organic thing I saw in these camps was the wood on the fire. You see an abundance of plastic all over Asia, whereas china is more acceptable in 1st world countries and plastic scorned upon as the cheap throw away alternative only used for picnics.

It was heart warming to watch the little naked boys playing in the sea again. Of course as soon as they saw I had a camera it was ‘Hello Mister, photo’. That’s the nice thing about digital, as soon as you take the photo you can show it to them, which is responded to with infectious giggling and broad smiles. I once saw a girl in Cambodia taking photos with a Polaroid camera. The best shots she got were the looks on the kid’s faces as their image appeared on the paper by magic.

Aid workers are slowly trickling back into East Timor; many have been here before so we are seeing the return of some die hard divers at our door. We had one guy from the Red Cross enquiring about diving at the weekend that had been a regular customer 4 years before. So the plan is to go diving on Saturday, not sure where yet, that all depends on the situation, but I can’t wait to get working again.

Come back Johnny the Tooth – East Timor 3rd June 2006

2006-06-04T00:13:00.000-07:00

We have 5 staff here at the dive centre all locals of East Timor, 4 officially and then there is Johnny. Maria, the housekeeper, disappeared up to the hills at the very start of the troubles and hasn’t been seen or heard of since. We suspect she’s up in the hills with no money to get back down again but our endeavours to try and contact her have remained fruitless. Nelson and Jose are our main dive hands and are both Advanced divers, they are both staying in refugee camps with their families. Nelson is staying at Arte Morris, an Art centre for Timorese boys and Nelson with Dr Dan. Both these organisations are charities not NGO’s (Non-Government Organisations), so do not have funds from private investors. Arte Morris promote and sell Timorese art as far as Europe and Dr Dan is probably the most knowledgeable authority on malaria and dengue fever in this part of the world. Every other fortnight the proceeds of the quiz night at the Dili Club go to Dr Dan.

Manuel I can only describe as Manuel out of Faulty Towers, ‘Que?’! He speaks Bahasa rather than Tetun and is a man of very few words. If you ask him something and he doesn’t understand, he remains motionless looking at you, so you try again, an awful lot of pointing at things goes on. Manuel had left his bike at the dive centre and we hadn’t seen him for a few days so we were getting a little concerned as Jose and Nelson couldn’t contact him. Wayne was out at the Komoro Bridge yesterday which was the centre of the gang fights. As he approached Australian troops detaining five Timorese men crouching on the floor, he realised that one of the men was Manuel. Picking him up and giving him some money raised the voices of the Australian troops who demanded to know what Wayne had given him. Wayne explained he was an employee and he had given him his wages. Manuel was then allowed to walk away.

It’s very hard for the Australian troops to make a judgement call. Is this a looter? Or is this someone trying to save his own possessions before his house is burned to the ground. Wayne came across another guy who was being detained by the troops; he was trying to take the tin off of his own roof as he feared that the house was going to be torched.

At least though the Ozzies came and helped, along with the Kiwis and Malays, in total over 2000 troops. But the snotty Portuguese have refused to put 120 police in here because quote ‘Portugal did not accept, does not accept, nor will not accept that the Republican National Guard be subordinate to the operational command of a foreigner’. A foreigner! Who do they think they are, with their piddly little force! They abandoned East Timor and allowed the Indonesians to invade in 1975; they are just as much foreigners to East Timor as the Australians are. Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Normality is returning, the trouble spots are much quieter, the supermarkets, banks and petrol stations are open again. A few chicken vendors are open at night, occasional taxis can be seen and an enterprising phone card vendor has set up a new pitch outside the Esplanada, lots of business for him because that’s where many of the journalists are staying. All we need now is for Johnny to return. Johnny owns a vending cart and his pitch is just opposite the dive centre Many a young whippersnapper has tried to muscle in on his pitch to no avail, when Johnny is there, we only buy from him. Because the dive centre has no bar, Johnny is our mobile off licence selling the cheapest Tiger beer in Dili. He also stocks our individual brands of cigarettes, Ann smokes menthol which is not popular with Timorese, but Johnny knows he will have regular demand. Johnny, like Manuel, is a man of little words and I've never seen him smile, but it would be quite hard for Johnny to smile as he has one protruding front tooth, hence the name Johnny the Tooth. Johnny sits outside come rain or shine with his extremely ventilated Freeflow T-shirt which has seen better years let alone days. So when Johnny’s cart appears again outside the dive centre then I can safely say things are getting back to normal.

We’ve got limes! – East Timor 1/6/06

2006-06-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in Dili, the supermarkets opened and the petrol stations. Ann had a field day, she even bought frozen limes, which turned out to be a cross between a lime and an orange, but what the hell, they still tasted good. Supplies were limited but she managed to concoct a fantastic feast for eight people that night. I was the only non-journalist related person in the crowd which is fascinating because you get a completely different take on things. One of the die hard journo’s was concerned about his rookie cameraman because the cameraman had got some superb up close and personal shot that day, but the temptation with the adrenaline buzzing is to get an even better shot the next day, regardless of his personal safety.

The French Ambassador came round. His contract actually expired today, but he has his staff and their families living in his home at the moment, so he’s not going to leave until his staff are re-housed safely, even though as from today he will not be insured to be in the country.

Hector is a very eccentric Australian guy who speaks the most fluent Tetun of any westerner. He lives up in the hills with the Timorese community. Up in the hills there is a shortage of rice, you can’t buy rice or water in the supermarkets because the UN has bought it all for redistribution to the refugees. Hector came down escorting a microlet on his motorbike, the microlet was full of vegetable, the local community here was ecstatic. One old guy was driving past on his motorbike and screeched to a halt, bought a bag of vegetables then drove away singing at the top of his voice. All the villagers seemed to have smiles on their faces and the chicken vendors even set up stall for a couple of hours tonight.

The vegetable truck really saw the turning of a corner because trade s starting to happen again, also many people that are stuck up in the hills with no money and no petrol are now seeing an empty microlet returning to the village with rice after having ventured into the city. That vegetable truck speaks volumes to the local community about safety.

I saw my first Australian army foot patrol in East Timor today, there were only two of them on foot, but it reassures the villagers that they are being protected. There are still gangs fighting on the streets of Dili, but the press have finally got it right, they are gangs of scroates, not army versus police. What makes it worse is many of the gangs have Chinese fire crackers which to the untrained ear sound like gunfire, of course there is still some gunfire but it makes it hard to differentiate. Here, if you insult a Timorese then you insult 30 members of their family, so much of the violence and burning is to do with revenge, also jealousy, if one family has more than another in their Campong.

The atmosphere is definitely calmer today with the Ozzy troops and Xanana declaring a state of emergency yesterday whilst taking control of the country’s forces. That’s the one guy that has the history and charisma to command respect in East Timor, let’s hope a peaceful solution is around the corner. The water is calmer again and I cant wait to get diving!

The boys are back in town - East Timor 30/5/06

2006-05-30T19:08:00.000-07:00

More troops are pouring into East Timor, so apart from the Ozzies, we now have Kiwi, Malaysian and Portuguese troops here and yet more journalists. The biggest story of yesterday was the Ozzy troops setting up a food station in the middle of Dili to hand out free rice. Given the normal abject poverty of East Timor, where many people go without rice in everyday life, no wonder they got 20,000 people queuing for free food. We watched the BBC World News coverage of the widespread violence throughout Dili. According to the reporter, no place was free of violence or safe in the whole of the city, and the food queue was a mass riot. Ann and I looked at each other, and then around the restaurant we had just walked to, had we missed something and walked there with our eyes shut? What amazed us was that the BBC led with a story on East Timor when the absolute tragedy of the Indonesian earthquake should have warranted priority. The report in The Times was the most sensationalist article I've read so far, it’s infuriating, because now I can see how friends and relatives can be completely misled about the safety of their loved ones by watching and reading this coverage.

I'm not denying that there is a very real problem here, but its not army versus police, its gangs of boys looting and torching who have no problem at all with the Malai (westerners) here. Shots are being fired but mostly in the air for bravado, stones are being throw and cars being torched. In fact, Wayne does not like going into non troubled areas for fear of inciting the scroates to play up to the camera. The difference is with him, he lives here. The death toll is reported at 11 people at the moment, 11 too many, but a small number if you compare it to other incidents like this around the world. Only this morning Wayne got the news that a very good friend of his was killed in Iraq.

Restaurants are bravely soldiering on with very limited menus. Everything is served with rice as potatoes and vegetables are in very scarce supply. Flip used to own the Dili Club on the seafront until it was commandeered by the government to build the Chinese Embassy. So he reopened near an area called Komoro, which has seen much of the fighting. The Dili Club is famous for its quiz nights and pizza. Not that the pizza is the best in town, but he’s the only one that delivers. Having been closed for most of the week, he opened for 2 hours and took $500 in pizza delivery orders, that’s a hell of a lot of pizza.

Ann went to pay her internet bill, the office of which was swarming with press trying to feed their stories. The owner was sitting on his balcony with a pair of binoculars, Ann thought he may be watching the battleships, but no, he was watching a whale in the bay spurting water from its blowhole. Surprisingly enough we haven’t had mass cancellations of tourists for later in the year, I guess divers are made of sterner stuff. I saw the same thing in Egypt after the Sharm bomb, the dive industry wasn’t affected as badly as I thought it would be.

We have a sense of Déjà Vu every evening when we venture two doors down to the Esplanada. Its getting very boring, but you have to get out of the house. The same faces every night, the press and the Embassy staff. According to the Embassy, half the Brits are still here, a hardy bunch. The Australian troops have issued two numbers for people to call if they see trouble in their area; the problem is getting this information to the local people. Many are fleeing their homes with their possessions because they don’t feel safe, but have no idea where to go. Whereas the troops are now encouraging people to return home so normality can be restored. We were watching a beautiful sunset when this double mattress walked past, you could hardly see the guy behind it. One of the press was running around the street taking photographs of a lady heavily laden with her possessions on her head. He then stopped to get a different shot and the lady had to struggle into the road to walk round him. I ripped him off a strip for that.

The government have been in meetings all day, and everyone is awaiting the outcome. There is not a simple solution but hopefully there will be one that sees peace restored in this beautiful country very soon. And I can get back to diving some of the best reefs in the world.

Sod the limes! Peace will do – East Timor 29/5/06

2006-05-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

In times of civil unrest, refugees, water shortages and burnt out houses, it really pisses you off when someone moans that they are really fed up with the situation because they can’t buy any petrol! To put some perspective on this, Wayne and the TV crew saved a 12 year old boy from being beheaded by a rival gang yesterday, so this whinging didn’t go down too well, obviously.

It’s reported that 50,000 refugees are in 35 camps around the city of Dili. Talking to a representative of World Aid last night, their problem is that the Timorese drivers are too scared to go to the camps so food is not being delivered. I've offered voluntary services to both World Aid and IMO (The International Organisation for Migration), but so far they haven’t taken me up on it. What they really need drivers that know the backstreets of Dili like the back of their hand.

We had our first glimpse of the Australian troops today, an armoured vehicle hurtling past the house, god it was noisy. One of the British Embassy staff agreed last night we are probably in the safest area of Dili. If trouble starts in Embassy Alley then it’s definitely time to leave the country.

Over 1000 troops have been deployed to East Timor. The Australian troops are focussing on disarming the rebels. One of the journalists had a great shot of a pile machetes, swords, arrows and axes, on top of which was a nice pair of hairdressers scissors with pink plastic handles. It reminds me of airport checks for nail clippers.

To top it all we had a phone call from one of our regular divers, he was sitting with a bloke that was stuck here for 10 days (probably on a visa run), who wanted to know if he could get some diving in while he was here. Well if the safety situation and the weather situation calm down in the next few days, then bring it on! This slightly unrealistic request did make us smile.

Wot no gin! East Timor 28th May 2006

2006-05-28T06:16:00.000-07:00

We have now run out of gin, we had to drink it with lemon as we couldn’t get any limes, not quite the same. Dili is heaving with press; we even have a cameraman sleeping in my classroom tonight as all the hotels are full. The hotels are also rapidly running out of beer, food and cigarettes as the container ships bringing supplies from Australia cannot get in. There is also a shortage of petrol for the same reason, so even if the supermarkets were open, which they are not, you can’t get there. And as for paying for supplies, the banks are closed with no money in the ATM’s so cash is being brought in by the next plane load of journalists.

Flights are still coming in from Darwin but the Merpati flight from Bali has stopped. Bang goes the evacuation to an exotic location. The UN have upgraded to level 3 security alert so all non essential personnel have been evacuated. Jurgen begrudgingly text me this morning as he didn’t want to leave, saying he was on a flight to Darwin did I need anything? Yes, gin and limes!

Thousands of Timorese are fleeing the city, taxis hare past full to the brim with people sitting in the open boot, however, the Australian troops have gone some way to quell the panic. Apparently the churches are full of refugees. Whereas before the Dili residents fled to the mountains, this time that’s where most of the trouble is, so the inner city churches are packed.

In times like this it is enlightening to see the fish and chicken vendors setting up their barbeques on the beach. Some entrepreneurs have put the price of phone cards up to $15 for a $10 card and occasionally you get an opportunist cigarette seller going door to door. The British Embassy advised us to stay indoors but we ran into both the Ambassador and the 2nd in command at the Esplanada last night. Well everyone has to eat!

The fighting is hooligans, they have no axe to grind with westerners, but as a precaution Wayne and the crew drive around with their arms out of the car so the colour of their skin can be seen. In the midst of the fighting these guys will shout ‘Hello mister’ whilst being pursued by Australian troops. One NZ reporter I was talking to last night almost got caught in crossfire, but I guess that goes with territory.

But as for me, i'm getting bored, our amusement of the day is watching the dogs play. Someone has upset the wind gods, probably Australian troops hot legging through sacred trees, so even if we could go diving, the water is too choppy. Ill never complain about not having enough days off again!

2006-05-27T23:32:00.000-07:00

What no limes! – East Timor 26th May 2006

East Timor has been full of firsts for me, my first leaf scorpionfish, my first Divemaster course, my first solo dive commercial job, my first earthquake, my first evacuation briefing by the British Embassy and the first time an Australian battleship has obscured by normally idyllic view of the sea. Living in East Timor at the moment is interesting, actually, its not, its bloody boring because we have all be told to leave the country or stay at home, so no diving!

There was a great episode in the series ‘The West Wing’ where the word ‘recession’ was not allowed to be used, so they used ‘biscuit’ instead. Back in April we started with a ‘biscuit’, scrotes running amok, vandalising and looting, somewhat akin to football hooligans. This was quoted by ABC News as ‘Pitched battles on the streets of Dili’, really? Where? Unfortunately, just recently the situation rose to the status of ‘bagel’, then ‘baguette’, and now we are at ‘bloomer’ or ‘damper’ for the Australian troops.

The British Embassy have been pretty cool keeping us informed, they didn’t rise to the hysteria levels of the Australians who evacuated all non-essential personnel after the first shot was fired. They did give us a great briefing regarding our options and evacuation procedures if it became necessary, pack a run bag, keep your passport on you etc. This was served with a smile, orange juice and biscuits (the edible kind), all very British. In an open forum of questions, the most important question raised was ‘Does anyone know where I can get some limes?’, if we were going to be confined to barracks we needed to stock up on the essential things such as food, water, gin, tonic and of course, limes. A G&T is just not the same without it!

That briefing did change the atmosphere, having to pack my bags made me weigh up the options of leaving. Wayne was assessing which room in the house was the safest, the one surrounded by most internal structural walls, to shield from bullets. That was a bit too much realism for me.

Driving around later in a lime pursuit, the streets of Dili were quiet, most of the cart vendors had packed and few cars were on the road. But the beaches were lined with smiling Timorese faces, they were watching the Australian battleship coming across the horizon, a welcome sight because the vast majority here just want to see and end to it. They had 25 years of fighting, with their homes burned and their love ones tortured and murdered, the last thing they want is a small faction reeking mayhem in their country.

The hotels are packed with journalists, one joker even checked in the Esplanada with a surfboard! He’s optimistic. My boss being an ex-war correspondent, and knowing the Dili streets like the back of his hand has landed himself a few days work as a driver. Well, we may as well use the dive truck for something as we can't go diving. He came back yesterday full of adrenaline, he’s having a great time back in the saddle. He brought in a couple of bullet proof vests, those things are really heavy, how anyone is supposed to run with that thing on, god only knows, its about the same weight as scuba gear.

There is fighting, there is bang-bang (a journo term!), there are dead (reportedly), but living with two ex-journalists has taught me to put things into perspective, it's not in my backyard. I live on the waterfront in Dili, in embassy alley. It seems essential here that all embassies have a huge amount of land and a sea view. So in a way it’s probably one of the safest parts of Dili as very few Timorese (or anyone else for that matter) live on this stretch of road.

Dili is a small place and the rumour mill is rife, people gossip and the press pick up on it, half the time its blown way out of proportion. I’ve heard everything from Xanana Gusmao has overturned the government and put the military in charge, to Xanana’s house has been attacked by a machete wielding mob, all of which just wasn’t true; it's like Chinese whispers in a small city like this. What doesn’t help is the Australian TV networks using footage from the violence of 1999, most public viewers would think the footage was from today, not 7 years ago.

At the moment our peace is broken not by gunfire, but by low flying helicopters. Everyone is optimistic that the situation will be resolved promptly, especially when the Australian forces that have been shipped in here actually outnumber the Timorese Army and Police together.

There was a bit of panic this morning with Timorese packing bags and leaving the city, but we have now been informed by Wayne our personal eye-witness reporter, that hundreds of Australian troops are marching down the main street of Dili, reassuring the locals that the city is safe, which is exactly what is needed.

We all hope that it is over soon, as the country is beautiful, the people so friendly and the diving is some of the best I’ve ever done in 14 years of diving.