Troubles on Timor

I flew onto the island of Timor with 20 days remaining before my scheduled return into the UK. By all standard measures 20 days of travel should feel gargantuan. Above and beyond the typical gold-standard of a 2 week good summer holiday for any working Brit. Probably the entirety of the yearly holiday allowance for a typical American. Travelling for a year though entirely warps your conception of time. 20 days feels like nothing.

A race to the finish line is unfurling before me.

20 days has become this teeth-clenching challenge to finally make it to my last remaining grand ambition after core plans for visits across central Asia, China and New Zealand failed to be realised. The ambition, shared with anybody who asked, and many who didn’t in recent weeks, was to make it to Timor-Leste.

People don’t typically go there and, as much as I would like to offer up some higher minded reason behind my interest in the place, I basically thought it would be mad cool to be somebody that did. It’s that classic obsessive ongoing drive for pushing past all the places ‘tourists’ usually lay their beach towels in order to see what’s going on out there – in the great unknown or some such.

Absolute nonsense of course.

While there’s not much tourism there’s a flood of NGOs helping the new country (only independent since 2002) grapple with the immense weight of the country’s poverty crises. They are a very catholic, Portuguese speaking nation and such conditions don’t really materialise in south-east Asia without a whole tonne of exposure to Europeans over the last few centuries.

It’s a far more awkward line of conversation to broach when compared with my usual opener with many locals around the world – ‘colonialism’, pretty messed up amiright? (a crude approximation of how I actually enter those discussions) – but as an agnostic soul I’ve always thought the insertion of religion into a far off country as even more insidious.

We’re not just going to exploit you for your labour, reap the resources of your land and fuck up your chances of stable institutions – we need you to think about your entire place in the world like us too. You could probably argue that that is inherent to the general colonialist spread of capitalistic notions too (also essentially a religion in the eyes of people like Yuval Noah Harari) but there seems something overtly more devilish about it in my eyes.

All that history can, of course, do nothing to stop the overarching tide of backpackers sweeping across pacific islands and proudly declaring to have been the first white person a certain villager has ever seen.

So, anyway, here I was on Timor, stepping foot into the great unknown where no white man had trod before. Having found out last minute that Kupang’s only hostel was essentially closed I quick fired off several couchsurfing requests as my plane was taking off.

I had mad results! When my plane landed 2 hours later I was put in touch with Conny who immediately came to pick me up to the airport and brought me into the home she shared with her sisters and nephew.

Conny was the connection to have in Timor, she carried herself with a casual confidence and was always quick with an encouraging laugh or smile so I felt immediately at ease stepping into her car. Her dad had studied a PHD in London and her English was perfect. I quizzed her about everything I could.

She worked intermittently with local NGOs and was the chief organiser for couchsurfing meet-ups in Kupang. She’d recently spearheaded a research project arguing for central governments recognition of local religions and was taking a Masters course online in order to further her development, learning statistics and all sorts for the first time in her early 50s.

In short she was super cool.

Using the couchsurfing platform was such a big part of Conny’s social life here on Timor and she’d even met her French fiancé through it, who was currently working as a teacher in Indonesia.

It seemed clear that Conny sat in a slightly higher social class than the average local, a third of whom live in poverty (compared to the national figure for Indonesia of 10%), but the lack of development on the island was still very apparent in her home and neighbourhood. Water only flowed from the taps 2 or 3 scheduled days a week and waste management in the area was an unseemly sight by even the standards of other parts of southeast Asia.

I was tired from travel so didn’t achieve much beyond chatting with Conny’s nephew and attempting to help in the kitchen that day. The main thing on my mind was to be ready for the all important trip to Timor-Leste’s consulate the next morning when it opened.

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I awoke a little later than intended the next morning but well rested and with excited purpose. Today was the day.

Financial obstacles had already arisen, directing me on an absurd flight path from Borneo to Vietnam via Singapore for a few days before heading on to Bali and now here. I shrugged off the cheaper exciting flight options of places like South Korea to stay true to my goal. Covid was not getting in the way this time. This was not going to be like my failed engagement with the Kazakhstan consulate in Azerbaijan, nor the time I admitted defeat at the Indian consulate in Dubai.

I was on the island already, a bus ride away, I was making this happen.

So I rocked on up to the consulate, every possible document needed in hand for onward travel, bank statements, passport photos (of differing sizes even just to make sure I didn’t miss a thing) and my enthusiastic smile was turned upside down by the revelation no authorisation could be given. They suggested I try to get my visa processed in Bali instead.

I had just spent 90 quid flying out of Bali for the express purpose of getting into Timor-Leste. I could have even flown straight into Dili at greater expense where I would have been granted a free visa on arrival. It would all be so much more possible if I were only further away from my destination.

My heart sunk and shrivelled as it’s prone to doing. I trudged along the poorly pedestrianised streets of Kupang alone.

Streets stained intermittently with the bright red of whatever oral cancer-inducing substance it was that so many of the locals were all enthusiastically and loudly chewing.

I was reminded of Alain du Button’s warning in his book ‘The Art of Travel’ that wherever you go the cruel fact remains that you take yourself with you. It’s his worst book. Yet, here I was in a foreign city now caged within my own head.

I hated everything. I hated the lack of good coffee. I hated the inability to clearly communicate my basic needs to any shopkeeper. I hated that I couldn’t walk further than 5 metres without some passerby shouting ‘MISTER’ at me, without any further English language skills to back up their loud interruption of my misery.

I was done with the unknown and sought the creature comforts of home.

I had planned to visit the local museum that afternoon but instead found myself on the top floor of a barely functioning mall, purchasing a single ticket to Thor: Love and Thunder.

There were now 19 days left in pacific paradise before I returned home.