Category Archives for Timor Leste
I have a bunch of funny motorbike stories from our trip across Indonesia and Timor Leste that I never got time to write up. Here’s a few of them. The Time I Drove Our Motorbike Into The Hotel Bar On arrival in Dili, Timor Leste, we were kind of knackered. There’s something about a challenging [...]
1: Go To An Exhibition There are few books on Timor Leste, so the best way to get a handle on this young nation’s story is to visit an exhibition. Dili’s museum of liberation, near the university, is currently closed for rebuilding, and a promised mobile version is nowhere in sight. But the harrowing Chega [...]
And… It's a Wrap
“Mr Z! Mr Z! Where’s Mr Z?!” I gesture, vaguely, towards Customs, where my son is crouched atop our bike. It’s been two weeks since we last crossed this border, but his fan club seems to have grown. It’s a dusty wasteland, twixt East Timor and Indonesia. There’s an optimistic archway and one of those [...]
Scenes from a Forgotten Conflict
An adult woman weeps as she recalls a childhood spent in prison. The time the soldiers forced her to torture her mother. And the times the soldiers tortured her to hurt her mother more. A man who was ten years old when his big sister was taken recalls how she never recovered from her rape. [...]
When I was in my (very) early teens, my mother ran out of petrol while taking me home from school. She set off, on foot, for the petrol station. I watched her trudge round the corner. Then, once she was out of range, I stepped out of the car for a sneaky cigarette and a [...]
A Very Young Country: Timor Leste
Timor smells different from Flores. It has that red dust scent with hints of gum, a dryness in the air, a scent more Australian than Asian. It looks different, too. Low huts, vast rivers reduced to swathes of pebbles, hills warped by geology into ludicrous curves, bent like the landscapes we saw in Arkaroola, South [...]
There’s not a lot of information on how to cross from Indonesia to Timor Leste overland. So here’s how to cross the Indonesia – East Timor land border. That way, irregular readers, you won’t do what we did. And, regular readers, you are spared another whiny blog post. 1: Get Visa Permission. Don’t Do It [...]
