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 Australia.

There are gnarled trees with leaves like toughened mimosas, droopy-leaved columns of shade trees, the Caribbean touch of bougainvillea.

We’re close to Australia, in Timor. Far closer than we are to Bali. 24 hours by boat from luxuriant Flores. 36 from dusty Darwin, plus or minus.

And it feels, the closer we get to Papua, the further we are moving from Asia.

The shifting rivalries of tribal kings and the interests of the colonial powers split the island of Timor into three. (It’s still home to a myriad kings, plus tens of tribal languages.)

West Timor is part of Indonesia. When the country carved itself into existence out of the Dutch possessions in the wake of World War II, West Timor was part of it.

East Timor? Well, that’s Timor Leste now, an independent nation, one of the world’s newest and one of its smallest: it’s only nine years old. It occupies the Eastern half of the island and a dot in the Indonesian west called Oecussi.

How so? Well, the Portuguese, the first colonists into the region, somehow clung on to their half of the island, and Oecussi, until the 1970s. Then from Angola downwards, their empire fell to pieces, and Timor Leste was free.

For, erm, nine days.

Then the Indonesian army moved in and occupied it. Its brutal occupation would last two and a half decades and lead, according to some Timorese estimates, to the deaths of one-third of the population.

There’s a museum in Dili. But, like a lot of stuff here, it’s currently being rebuilt.

On the drive from the Indonesian border we while away the time by playing “spot the UN vehicle”.

The UN’s been in here for well over a decade now, first supporting the removal of the Indonesians, then helping with reconstruction, then reconstructing again after they pulled out a little too soon and the new nation collapsed into internecine strife…

We pass villages of simple bamboo huts, thatch roofs, scrawny livestock. Hills, which in their curving redness resonate Australia, frame coastal villages where folk eke a brutal living salt farming. The first town we get to that’s big enough to have masonry has bullet-holes in some of it.

And there’s the big UN landcruisers rolling by, with A/C and tinted glass.

A contrast, to put it mildly.

We’re not sure we’re into Dili at first. The Timor Leste capital is the lowest rise city I’ve seen, lower rise even, I think, than Nouakchott, Mauritania.

It sprawls for miles along the bay, yet standing below the vast statue of Jesus which Suharto pointed at Jakarta like some sick joke on the cape outside town, it’s barely visible against the hills behind.

Except for the churches. Of which, as in Indonesian Flores, there are many. And the pristine white lines of the Palacio Goberno.

Dili is not a large place – far smaller and with a much poorer population than its Indonesian opposite number, Kupang, a buzzing city of 400,000.

But it’s a melting pot. And – this takes me by surprise – it’s culturally utterly distinct from Indonesian West Timor.

There’s Tetun spoken, Portuguese, Indonesian, English, a kind of weird Tetun-Portuguese creole, a whirlpool of Chinese scripts… (Chinese traders were here before the Portuguese and it takes more than a pogrom or two to shift them out.)

We meet Timorese with African features, Papuan features, Oceanian features, a sprinkling with Malaysian features…

The bright waterfront, the big ships mouldering in the waters, men up to their knees fishing, vendors touting green coconuts for sale with spoons ready cut from their shells feels – well, it feels Caribbean, in a way.

On the whitish beach round the cape from the Jesus Statue, Areia Branca, we eat baby veal carpaccio at white-clad tables with billowing draperies at a Portuguese-African-Timorese-European restaurant named Knua Morabeza, where a guy draws on a fat cigar as he works at his laptop.

Timorese women scrape seaweed from the shore with their bare hands, itinerant traders walk past dangling bunches of oranges from shoulder yokes, and optimistic touts push mobile phone top-ups, cigarettes and weaving, as guys play ping pong on the beach…

“You can get anything in Dili, if you pay,” someone told us before we came.

He was, up to a point, right. You can’t find English language books – though there is a library, or “reading room”. But there are sushi restaurants, Australian bars, Turkish breads, Australian wines, imported spirits, fine dining restaurants, pizzerias…

Just after the World Bank, we walk down an alley past a stinking “stream” in which two guys wade barefoot – fishing?!

And you sort of wonder where it’s going to end. I’m told the channel between Dili and Atauro island, 30km or so off shore, descends 3.5km below the surface of the sea, into the Timor Trench.

Nice for tourists, as whales often pass through.

Even nicer for the world’s great powers, since it’s one of the few places deep enough for nuclear subs of all persuasions to cross between oceans unchecked. There’s talk of Americans building a submarine base into the island; the Australians tried to build a dumping ground for boat people here.

So I guess some of the big swish embassies which line Dili’s main drag will stay and prosper…

Z’s gobsmacked by them. “China, I can understand,” he says. “Malaysia too, I guess. But Poland?! Cuba?!”

It’s a dry land, Timor, and mountainous. Not made for farming. There are oil and gas reserves, and a little gold, too.

But it’s hard to see how they can possibly build an economy here, how they can manufacture anything, grow anything, even craft anything.

There’s an economy running now, turbocharged by NGOs, peacekeepers, trainers, UN workers. But what happens when they leave?

Tourism, I’d hope.

Because it’s a beautiful place, Timor Leste.

But at the same time, you wonder how a country this poor, this small and this young can honestly ever exist. It’s a question, I think, folk are puzzling over themselves.