Happy Christmas, West Timor
Three short, khaki-clad Indonesian soldiers surrounded me, brandishing
submachine guns. They took turns to yell at me loudly. I didn’t understand
what they were shouting, but a prod of a gun barrel in my back was a good
incentive to do as they asked. I was route-marched back to the Indonesian
border, where the interrogation started. Welcome to West Timor.
It was Christmas Eve 2000, around five in the afternoon, and I had just
started the long walk through the desolate ‘no man’s land’ between
Indonesian West Timor and the newly-independent East Timor.
I can’t say I hadn’t been warned. On my tour across Indonesia, I had
contacted the British Consulate in Jakarta and told them of my plan to visit
East Timor via West Timor. A friendly official, whom I’ll call Jim, told me
in no uncertain terms to stay out of the whole island. “I heard that two
tourists who visited West Timor had serious problems. The man was badly
beaten up and the woman was raped. But that was months ago”. Jim also said
that nobody knew what was happening in East Timor.
Three months previously, three United Nations workers had been murdered in
West Timor and the event had made world headlines.
East Timor was originally a Portuguese colony that sought independence, only
to be invaded by the Indonesian army in 1975. Harsh treatment by the army
triggered a bloody civil war and a renewed attempt at independence.
In 1999, backed by the Australian army and facing a deteriorating Indonesian
army, they finally broke away but were still awaiting official nationhood.
Thousands of Timorese fled as refugees but were now being encouraged to
return to their homeland, which had been blown to pieces.
“The UN are supposedly in charge,” Jim said, “and it’s chaotic.”
I hadn’t met any other westerner in Indonesia who had been to Timor, or had
any desire to go. But I did. Despite a hopelessly outdated guidebook, I
decided to play it by ear.
At Ende ferry port on the island of Flores, I was lucky; at midday the
weekly ferry would leave for Kupang, the capital of West Timor. I bought a
$4 ‘economy’ class ticket, and the smiling ticket seller wished me good luck
as I lugged my backpack to the gangplank.
The battered old ferry carried no cars – just a few mopeds on the car deck,
surrounded by hundreds of families, squatted down on drab woollen blankets.
They spread out their string-tied cardboard boxes, market goods and food and
gave their pigs and chickens a free rein. It looked like a refugee camp.
On the open deck above, I was able to rent an air mattress for 50 cents and
lay out on the floor in relative comfort. Local hawkers were attempting to
sell bottled drinks and snacks, and jumped off the boat seconds before it
left dock.
A horizon of dark open sea spread out before me, and I didn’t see land again
for the next fourteen hours. As the token tourist, I was surprised to be
left alone for the whole journey; Indonesians love to meet foreigners and
pump them for the usual resume, but here everyone seemed too tired to bother
me.
In the evening, midway through the voyage, there was an impromptu karaoke
session. One of the crew sang badly out of tune to a jumping CD player at
ear-splitting volume. I wanted to throw him overboard after five minutes. He
kept it up for a solid two whole hours.
The packed ferry pulled into the dark, silent port of Bolok at around 2:30am
on Christmas Eve. I followed people off the boat to a line of bemos, cheap
public minibuses, that took some of us into the centre of Kupang and then on
to the outlying bus terminal.
The foodstalls were just starting to open there, ready for the early morning
customers. A traditional Indonesian breakfast of Nasi Goreng passed the
time. This is a plate of fried rice with slivers of meat and vegetables and
a fried egg on top. At dawn, some ninety minutes later, I was on the first
bus heading north.
We left the coastal plains for rugged scenic hill country, wide flat river
valleys and strange wooden beehive-shaped shelters with thick thatched
roofs. Unlike most Indonesian islands, Timor is not volcanic, and it is
actually attached to Australia a few hundred miles south. It is an
attractive island with relatively tidy villages and towns and a
predominantly Christian population.
In bright sunshine and ferocious heat, Christmas carols were booming out of
tape recorders, sounding a little strange with Indonesian lyrics. There were
frequent police checks and we would all file out to get patted down beside
army trucks while the bus was searched thoroughly. My British passport
elicited a great deal of interest but I was not questioned. This was the
first island where I had seen Indonesian soldiers milling around, guns
hitched over their shoulders, or sitting in the shade of sandbagged dugouts.
The clutch on the bus had been playing up and finally gave up the ghost
outside Kefamenaru. As is typical of the regular breakdowns in Indonesia, it
was fixed by the side of the road in under twenty minutes and we arrived on
the outskirts of the last major town in West Timor by mid-afternoon. The
300-kilometre ride had cost $3 and taken nine long hours, but mercifully I’d
had a seat!
Atambua, I discovered later, was where the UN workers had been killed in
September. The place still felt pretty tense as I walked over a
rollercoaster series of low hills into the dilapidated centre of crumbling
buildings. I was greeted with endless cries of “Hey Mister” by the local
youths, but they seemed to be jeering at me rather than being friendly.
Nobody spoke English and my attempts at finding a bus terminal were
fruitless. Finally, a shop owner called Made walked up to me. “You’re brave
coming here,” he said. I told him that I was heading for East Timor. “No
chance,” he concluded, but he offered to give me a ride in his pickup to the
central bemo area by the market. Here I caught the last minibus of the day,
heading for the last village on the border, 34 km away on the coast.
The minibus was full of drunk men who had been celebrating in town. They
chained-smoked their krekek, sweet-smelling clove cigarettes, and passed a
bottle of local rice wine around. Their rambling, incoherent attempt at
pidgin English left me none the wiser as to what might await me at the
border.
Mutaiin was a tiny hamlet of wooden shacks and thatched roofs surrounded by
lush green, tropical vegetation and an assortment of thin livestock. Cows,
pigs and chickens sat in the dirt undisturbed, while a pack of barking,
cavorting hounds from hell ran along the single track through the village.
The police checkpoint at the border was deserted. There were no signs in
English or even a sign to indicate that this was now an international
border. A small, partially-clothed boy stood nearby. “Timor?” I quizzed him,
and he pointed east past the empty sandbagged army dugouts. I started
walking into the demilitarised zone and it was then that I was accosted by
the three Indonesian soldiers.
Back at the army camp, someone went to get their supervisor. Ketut was a
tidy, fit-looking officer in his early twenties, and he spoke a little
English. “The border is closed. It closed at four o’clock,” he told me. “It is
also closed tomorrow, Christmas Day, and the next day and the day after that
which is the end of Ramadan. Public holidays.”
Ketut took me to a nearby compound where a plain, whitewashed one-storey UN
outpost stood. Inside, we found a Pakistani Army Officer, whom I’ll call
Nabil, and a young soldier from Thailand who had just arrived for his tour
of duty. I explained the situation.
Nabil told me that in order to cross the border I’d have to get a written
letter of permission from the Indonesian Immigration Office at Atambua.
“Where is it?” I asked. “We don’t know,” he replied. “But it will be closed
all week anyway.” With this information, my sortie into East Timor seemed
doomed.
There was nowhere to stay in Mutaiin, so it was back to Atambua – or rather
it wasn’t. Dusk was falling and the bemos had stopped running. I decided to
hike back eleven kilometres to the small port of Atapupu which was larger
and where, perhaps, I would be lucky enough to find a bemo or a losmen
(local guesthouse).
As I walked out of the village an off-duty policemen, Wayan, stopped to ask
me what I was doing. He offered me a ride and so I clambered onto the back
of his 2-stroke moped. Wayan, in his fifties, spoke only Indonesian and
Portuguese but he implied that there wouldn’t be any bemos tonight; on
Christmas Eve, it seemed, everyone went to church services.
We passed by hundreds of villagers, dressed up in their best clothes,
walking towards their local churches. The darkness of the unlit road was
punctuated by small grottos of religious figures, decorated with flashing
fairy lights.
Sure enough, Atapupu was dead. It was dark and there was nowhere to stay.
Atambua lay a further 25km over the hills. Wayan told me that he could not
take me there. It was too dangerous for him, which he indicated by drawing
his finger across his throat. He offered to take me back to Mutaiin to the
UN office and let them sort something out.
The UN response was painfully clear: “You can’t stay here. We are a military
observation post. We could be attacked at any time and we can’t be
responsible for you.” Nabil finally spoke to his superiors by walkie-talkie
but they also denied me permission to stay.
The Indonesian Army next door was contacted. Nabil talked to Ketut in
Indonesian. The body language of the young man was obvious; as he waved his
arms around, his reply appeared to be “We don’t want his blood on our hands
if we get attacked.”
By now, I was feeling rather as Joseph and Mary must have when they were
looking for somewhere to stay on this very night two thousand years ago.
Wayan and I then tried the police checkpoint nearby. I think their response,
in Indonesian, was “Oh what the hell, he can stay with us. Who cares if we
get attacked”. So it was agreed that tonight I’d sleep on the floor of the
police hut, along with two policemen.
I gave Wayan, my guardian angel, an old rugby shirt that I hadn’t worn in
months. Wayan seemed very pleased, though the shirt had probably seen more
miles than his moped.
Since it was “too dangerous at night”, two armed soldiers accompanied me
into the village. At a stall I bought some snack food and beer for the
policemen, and the three of us sat in our tiny concrete cell to eat and
drink by candlelight. Nyoman and Dodi spoke no English, but they gratefully
accepted my offerings of food and drink, burping and farting and eating with
their mouths open – all in true Indonesian style.
The washing facilities were interesting. There was a well out back, where I
pulled up buckets of water by rope and showered in the dark. I’d been
traveling non-stop for forty hours so anything felt good. The toilet had no
door, which I discovered when a flash of my torch revealed a soldier
squatting in the dark. Not recognising me, he thought he was under attack
and went for his gun.
So I spent Christmas Eve on a threadbare blanket on the concrete floor of a
police cell with no electricity. The two policemen snored their heads off
while soldiers took turns to stand guard outside. At one point, there was an
almighty roar, as if the tin roof were being bombarded. It was just a
rainstorm, but so fierce that I thought for an instant we really were under
fire.
Christmas Day, 5am. Breakfast was a half-bottle of flat beer. I had no
choice but to turn around and start walking back to Atapupu. The heat rose
as I hiked along the coast, and before long I was sweating like the many
pigs that I passed.
The locals were up and off to church again, the women and girls in colourful
white and pink dresses, and the men in stiffly pressed white shirts and long
trousers. By the time I reached Atapupu, the churches were overflowing with
people. I sat outside one and waited for a bemo. A policeman rolled up on
moped and inspected my passport, then introduced himself as Willy and took
me to the spartan police station and gave me tea.
“Where is the Indonesian Immigration office in Atambua?” I asked Willy.
“There isn’t one,” he replied, shaking his head. His basic English vocabulary
revealed more: Atambua was too dangerous for foreigners. If I was going to
stay there, I’d better stay at the police station. More nights in concrete
cells, I thought to myself, but I went anyway.
Willy flagged down a bemo which took me back to Atambua. I was stuck between
a rock and a hard place. Nobody knew what was going on. The border was shut
for days. Atambua was a nothing town of jeering locals. There was nothing to
do, nowhere to stay and everyone kept telling me to get the hell out of
Atambua. So I did.
I caught a bus heading back to Kupang in the late morning. The driver was
taking no prisoners and gunned it all the way there in just over six hours.
The cramped passengers were thrown around the bus like pinballs.
Due to the lack of tourists, most hotels and losmens in Kupang had shut
down, but I found L’Avalon Homestay open. While I fixed his computer,
Edwin, the owner, gave me the lowdown.
Yes, you could cross the border for East Timor, if you turned up early in
the morning. The ‘Immigration letter of permission’ was a foil to keep
tourists away and did not exist. Edwin told me that two tourists had managed
it over the previous fortnight, but the authorities had messed them around.
The Indonesian border, however, because of Ramadan, would probably be closed
until the New Year.
Edwin’s register revealed that only a dozen tourists had passed through in
the previous three months. One of them walked in. Chad, blond and tanned,
was the archetypical American surfer. A week earlier, he had managed to
cross the border at Montaai. There had been no problems until he reached
Dili, the capital of East Timor.
He started his account by saying that East Timor “was a nightmare, man” and
Dili “was bombed to shit”. The UN workers were holed up in the only hotels
that had been repaired, which then charged extortionate rates because the UN
was paying. Prices were grossly inflated to match the local currency of
American and Australian dollars. Hotel rooms the size of a rabbit hutches
started at $50US – if you could find one. Hiding from the Australian Army
security, Chad had slept on the beach for one night and got out of there.
To leave East Timor you have to visit the Indonesian Immigration office in
Dili to get a new Indonesian visa. Chad was lucky. Sometimes it is closed
for days, while your US dollars are sucked out of you.
I finally conceded defeat. Chad and I were on the next plane to Bali for a
more comfortable vacation.
My adventure in West Timor had been an interesting experience, but it
wouldn’t perhaps be everyone’s choice of venue for Christmas!
About the Author
Bob Jack has just completed a 700 day overland trip from England to
Australia and up to China. You can read about his adventures at
www.angelfire.com/ak3/bobjack100
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