February 10, 2006
Old Woman on Mountain Loe Laku
In Maliana there is a large mountain that towers over the east edge of the city called Loe Laku. During the evening, when the sun sets over the low rolling hills of the west, framed by bright green rice fields, clouds roll in to cover the lower slopes of the mountain, but slide below the top peaks, which remain exposed to the dying rays of the sun.
In these last rays, Joao told me that there were histories of this mountain, but only the old mountain folk knew them and no one had bothered to go and ask. But he said there was one malae who knew these stories too. She came in 1975, interested in Timorese culture, specifically in spiritual objects likun. She had a daughter who goes to University in another country. She left after 1975 because of the Indonesian time, but then came back, and then later left Maliana to go to Loe Laku, and was followed by many Timorese who went with her to form a city on the west side of the mountain. In that city, he said, she was a special malae, not like most malaes. She chews the mama malus, and gets really red teeth like the old women of Timor. While most people cannot hold likun, she can. When I asked why, Joao laughed and then leaned in. He said she was learned in the likun, and as she was interested in Timorese culture she would ask people to bring their clothes and tais (traditional Timorese weaving) to her house, but that if they came at night they could not come in - they would just leave it on the veranda. But some people did see her at night, and when they did, she was transformed into a snake, and all the people who saw her died.
That night I stared up at the mountain and hoped that I would one day meet this malae with red teeth, but that I would make sure to go in the day ... just in case.
Posted by storbert at 9:39 PM | Comments (0)
October 5, 2005
... and I'm getting sappy
.. don't kill me I know this is silly.
"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in." â€" Ricky Fitts, American Beauty
It's one of my favorite lines from a movie [and yes, I do know that it makes me a sap]. I assume that everyone has moments where they can finally relate, and if they don't then they need to get out of the house. Mine came for two straight days on yet another trip for work into the districts. Trust me, I am not on any euphoric high about Timor right now. I am often tired and getting cynical, when it seems that nothing can revive your faith in the dust, heat, trash-filled streets littered with men with nothing to do but leer at foreigners. But the land here can. Timor is more than anything, a spectacular land. I truly understand why they are proud of it â€" I am proud even to live here for a year. The photos I took barely do it justice, but I am going to try and tell the story will as little reliance on the photos as possible.
The trip starts out by climbing into the steep hills around Dili, and from there you can see it's not just you that feels crowded. Dili IS crowded, and big, even though after four months living there it is beginning to feel incredibly small. But from there the road twists and turns and does its best to make your breakfast come back out, and then the world transforms completely.
The first day, on the way to a town called Ainaro, I saw what my imagination had once told me Timor would look like. Tucked in the hills are the most picturesque villages imaginable. Children play in tumbling streams, waving ecstatically to the passing SUVs, and grass huts are tucked in nooks of rocks. Immaculately-tended rows of crops stripe the rolling to physics-defying steep hills, and women wrapped in gold, orange and green tais (locally-made cloth) walk like acrobats on narrow red-earth paths between villages. Here, the world doesn't smell of body-odor, rotting garbage, or animal feces, but smells like deep-forest moss and mulch. Every now and then brilliant vermillion and bright purple trees dot the landscape. Coffee plants cluster under trees with wide-arms that made the sun retreat to dots, and occasionally someone will have felled a palm tree and you can smell the sticky-sweet pulp. It was exactly what I needed to clean my soul.
But nothing this beautiful can be without history. As we were driving out from Ainaro, the guys (who had previously been telling running jokes about farm animals in the street), started telling me about a particular cliff. Turns out, this is the grave for countless victims of the Indonesian occupation. Elvio, my co-worker, gets out and leads me to the edge. As I walk along, snapping pictures, he explains they call this place the 'Jakara' of Timor, as people would be piled into trucks and led here to 'go to school in Jakarta', and then would be pushed off …
[Me following Elio to the edge of Jakarta]
[... and then looking down ...]
Elsewhere, reminders are in the form of the burnt-out hulks of villages …
Or the casings of bombs …
The relics of a Portuguese pasada, perched on the top of a hillside where the Portuguese used to reign …
Ever after seeing all of this, though â€" you can't help but wonder how it is that hope springs eternal. Case and point: the building of a traditional house outside of Aileu::
... all in all, all I can say is, is ... that was an awesome trip.
Posted by storbert at 7:03 PM | Comments (1)
September 24, 2005
Baucau, Baucau
Three-day trip to Baucau, and I come back with one banana, a bad case of stomach-unhappiness, and a headache. In truth, it was amazing. What was more astounding was that we stayed in the same guest house I had stayed at on my first trip to the districts, three days after I'd first come to Timor, and all of three, whole, months ago. Self-reflection here we come. So, I sat about on the porch in the evenings and wrote like a mad woman - about Timor, about me (have I changed? am I still the same? am I still sane ...), and drove my poor co-worked nuts with curiosity about just WHAT I was writing on about.
But really, Baucau was fun. At one point, my co-worker and I were stuck without a car and went microliting around until we found lunch at a local padang (where they didn't really figure the meat needed cooking, so I kinda went hungry that day). The kids coming home from school on the microlet thought it was hysterical to have a massive malae crouched on their bus. I have discovered that despite the discomfort I really like microlets. I also like their price (10 cents, anywhere the microlet is going ... not a bad deal, and sure beats train rides).
But what I've really discovered is that I love driving. The landscape here is phenomenal. Over the space of a couple kilometers, you can feel you are in a jungle, and then the world's sparsest desert. At one point, the land juts up from the sea in steep slopes of bright red earth spotted with evenly-spaces white trees with thin, light green foliage. I should have taken a picture, but I was too busy gawking. Driving, you see the wares hawked on the side of the road, and the excitement of people seeing a car pass by (kids scream 'malae, malae') - and you realize just how incredibly lucky you are even to have wheels.
Enough reflection. I'll put a pic of an old Portuguese something in here for kicks, and then I'm going to pig racing later today.
Posted by storbert at 12:24 AM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2005
The Trip to Maliana
Yes, I am back from my visit to Maliana. There, I was supposed to do some 'business development mentoring' as this is, believe it or not, my current job. But before we get there, we drive for three hours over rocky coastlines and past gorgeous beaches - into the middle of the country (away from the coast) to where the land is green and smells like Alabama, for some reason (I can't explain it). This is just a random picture of a man sitting on a stump that I found interesting:
So we get to Maliana, and since the manager isn't going to meet us until later, we hang out with a monkey named Saca (but apparently you can call all monkey's Sico):
Eventually, after wandering around the city we actually make it to the radio station:
And that really is the extent of my trip. Exciting now isn't it. Oh, and I slept -- which I didn't take a picture of, though I promise to try harder next time.
Posted by storbert at 1:43 AM | Comments (1)
June 7, 2005
East Timor Travel Articles
A couple people [PiAers Amy Kohout and Anastasia] have sent me some wonderful links.
The first I actually read in the New York Times and is worth checking out. It is a half-hearted endorsement of East Timor as an unspoiled-though-hard-to-get-to travel area, and catalogs both some of the nice parts (scuba diving, which I don't know how to do) and some of the not as nice parts.
The second article documents the work of an expat doctor in ET - and I'll let it speak for itself.
[Incidentally, if you don't want to have to log on to the NYTimes website go to bugmenot.comm - and they give you a free username and password]
Posted by storbert at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)