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The tide was out and the rock pools that had been left behind were full of orange starfish basking in the morning sun. My guide assured me that they were still alive so I poked one. Its hard body didn’t respond, but I couldn’t stop staring at it, sprawled out, covered with black spots as if the heat was sucking the life out of it.
We came to a group of children paddling in the water and turning over stones to see what was underneath. I took out my camera and smiled at them. One of the younger ones started crying, setting off a chain reaction of bawling children until every person under five years old within a 50-metre radius was screaming and wailing.
“I guess they don’t meet many tourists here,” I said.
My guide smiled nervously. He had already confessed that he didn’t speak English and I’d replied that I couldn’t speak Tetun or any of the three dialects that residents of Atauro island use.
East Timor is an unusual place to travel in. Less than 20 miles away in Dili there were shells of buildings, wrecked and twisted, in the epicentre of a country in a constant state of change. But this – this was different. Here was a 100-square-kilometre island, rich in culture, full of life, with beaches and mountains and tiny communities ripe for exploring. But there wasn’t a single tourist around.
The people at the Tua Koin eco-lodge where I was staying had assigned my guide, Salvadore, to take me on a long walk. “Let’s go?” asked Salvadore, as the chorus of sobs got louder. I looked around at the chaos I had created and nodded.
A boy with a spear walked by and I used hand signals to ask if I could try and catch a fish. I saw one dash from rock to rock, frantically waggling its tail as it swam. I stood still, watching, waiting. The fish ripped across the water and I launched the spear at it, tumbling to my knees as I did. The water settled, the fish was nowhere to be seen and I decided that my days of spear fishing would be short-lived.
Wading through the rock pools and trying to stop myself from falling over, I saw old men and women with baskets looking in the water and turning over the dark stones. Some men were tending to a net, trying to unravel it.
Salvadore and I walked along the waterfront for about an hour. When we couldn’t go any farther, we scaled a hill, more like a cliff, and began our trek up into the heart of Atauro. We left the sea breeze behind until all that remained was hot, dry air. An old, barefooted man passed us on his way down, his long stick propping him up as he ambled towards the sea.
Our first destination was the small village of Makili. We came down a slope to get there. It was beautiful. The land was brown and dry with splashes of perfect green. Small thatched huts were dotted all over while out in the distance the waves lapped against the shore. Farther still, over the Wetar Strait, I saw the hills of Dili looming in the background.
There was no movement in the village except for a couple of moody dogs that barked at us as we walked through. I could hear a lady chanting with a raspy voice. Two young women passed us and my guide took a dead fish out of his pocked and gave it to them. I knew he had been up to something in the rock pools.
All of a sudden about 10 children ambushed us, giggling hysterically as they crowded around us, asking me to take their photo. Other children heard the commotion and poked their heads out of their homes to see what was going on. Soon enough I felt like a prophet, with my band of followers in tow, ready to listen to my parables.
I crouched down in the shade for a moment and the mass of bodies knocked me over. We had to start walking uphill again. It would be several hours before there was another downhill.
The number of children in our troupe diminished until it was just me and Salvadore again. My mouth was dry. Salvadore was carrying a 1.5-litre bottle of water, but I’d already taken a few gulps of it and it had left an unsavoury taste in my mouth.
I was considering stopping for a rest when Salvadore gave me a knowing look and said, “Coconuts.” He led me into the yard in front of one of the huts, where we woke up a bearded man in a blue polo shirt. No sooner than he was awake, the man leapt to his feet and scaled a 20-metre coconut tree. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
We all three of us sat down on a bench in the yard and Salvadore hacked away at the coconuts with a machete. I guzzled down the milk and devoured the flesh of two of them. It was delightful.
After a couple of rounds of cigarettes we bid farewell to the man and continued up the hill until I could almost touch the clouds. The splashes of green became more and more prominent and a cooling breeze picked up. I was beginning to wish that I had worn sturdier footwear than flip flops.
There was a small clearing where water from a spring was piped to. People were bathing and cleaning their clothes. An old woman was crouched down washing her hair. The ground was littered with plastic sachets that had once contained soap, shampoo or washing powder – a common sight in Timor, where rubbish usually goes on the floor.
We reached the peak of our ascent. It had been a long walk and the world was now stretching out into the distance beneath us. We sat down. The only sounds were made by the wind or goats milling about nearby. We looked out over the trees, across the sea, along the island. I felt such sadness that nobody else was seeing this.
About 8,000 people – mostly farmers and fishermen – live on Atauro. The few foreigners who do visit tend to work in Dili and go over for weekends. I was an oddity – I wasn’t working for an NGO and I wouldn’t be flying back to Dili in a helicopter.
All that was left was the long walk back down to base camp, with a brief stop at a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the way. Back at the eco-lodge, I looked down and saw that I was covered in so much dust that my feet were black. I drank a cold beer in the open-air dining area with the sea less than 20 metres in front of me. “This is the good life,” I thought to myself, before walking to the beach and dunking myself in the water.
This was my weekend getaway. Also staying at the eco-lodge were a group of Portuguese people who looked offended whenever I greeted them and an American lady named Sally, who had told me, “We actually play ‘spot the tourist’ in Dili. There are more of them now, but we still don’t see very many.”
She was right. In the few weeks I had been in Dili I couldn’t remember seeing more than five or six tourists. I certainly hadn’t met any. The guestbook of Tua Koin told a similar story. “You don’t get many people staying here, do you?” I said to Marcello, who works at the eco-lodge.
“Before the crisis in 2006, we used to have a lot of people coming here, but now it’s a problem with transport and there are no tourists,” he told me.
The problem with transport to Atauro is that the main ferry link only travels from Dili to the island once a week. The Nakroma leaves Dili on Saturday morning at 9 am and returns in the afternoon at 3 pm. The only way to get back on any other day, unless you can hitch a lift in a chopper, is to ride a “local boat”, as I would find out later.
I took a walk around the eco-lodge. It was a small commune of eight lodgings, a kitchen, the dining area and lots of palm trees. The cabins had either one or two stories, with verandas underneath or in front. Each room had two beds, a light and small table.
Everything was simple and eco-friendly. The electricity came from solar panels, there was a ventilated composting toilet and there were recycling bins for different kinds of waste. The eco-lodge is operated by island-based organization Roman Luan, which channels the profits back into community projects.
For 25 bucks a night, you don’t get much in the way of modern conveniences, but I was filled with despair at the thought of having to leave this place and return to Dili.
It was about 3 pm and a lunch of rice and stewed chicken had been served. All my meals were provided. For breakfast I ate fruit and bread rolls and drank coffee. “At lunch and dinner we have rice with fish or chicken – and some vegetables,” Marcello had told me.
That night, I lay down on the veranda under my room, looking out at the stars, with the wind rustling the trees and the sound of waves breaking in the background. At that point there was nowhere else on earth I would have rather been. I dozed until about 5 am and went to the beach to watch the sunrise.
The sky at the horizon was already changing from a dreary blue to an electrified orange. I waited. The edge of a dark silhouette suddenly lit up as if a fire was raging. The sun rose with effortless grace as a couple of fishermen stretched on their boat, which was moored just off the beach. I felt privileged to have seen such a spectacle.
My trip had to end the next day. One of the guys from the eco-lodge had told me to wake up at 4:30 am so he could take me to the boat. It was only a short, dark stroll away. There were about 10 Timorese people on the shore, waiting for a small row-boat that was ferrying people back forth to our vessel.
I waded into the water and clambered in, all the while trying to keep my bag dry. On the main boat there was another group of Portuguese people, a few locals and a couple of chickens. Someone also had also brought along a motorbike, which we somehow managed to heave on board and tie up.
The engine whirred to life and its pathetic chug took us back to Dili about as fast as I can swim. We rocked back and forth, taking on water. Most people slept, but I was struggling to stay sat in one place. The sun came up and at least it was light and warm again.
The Nakroma took about two hours to get to Atauro; the boat on the way back took more than four. I tried to pretend I was Portuguese and worked in Dili so that I would only have to pay the $4 local fare, but I was rumbled and coughed up the $15 tourist fee.
Dili was its usual bleak self. I took a walk along the gravly beach, but instead of the orange bodies of starfish, all I could see were red and pink drinks cans. I looked back out over the sea and saw the outline of the hills of Atauro in the distance and the island felt a world away.
Take a look also at Matt Crook’s Phuket website: a labour of love, that he says may one day make millions. hahahahahahahah (his laugh).
Copyright © 2009 Matt Crook
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