just a quick note to say I'm in Dili

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Just a quick note that I arrived in Dili yesterday. As far as I can work out, Internet is a bit unreliable, and I can't find a wireless access point. I mainly spent yesterday walking around Dili, which is quite spread out, fairly poor, and full of UN vehicles everywhere. I got bitten by lots of mosquitos already, despite taking all the precautions, but don't worry Mum I'm taking my doxy tablets :-)

East Timor's very expensive compared to other SE Asian countries. They use the US Dollar as their official currency which doesn't help, and like everywhere else that uses the US Dollar, the constant struggle is to find denominations low enough to pay people with, because no-one has change!

The bit I saw yesterday showed signs that it used to be much prettier than it is now, my guess would be that it's been rebuilt since the retreating Indonesians destroyed everything in their wake in 1999, but still not back to where it was before civil war and Indonesian invasion in 1975. The parks I saw are overgrown, the foreshore has some statutes lying in ruins, and while there's a lot of big new buildings, and a few nice restaurants, and (apparently) nice hotels, there's also a lot of ruined buildings. Pictures of Che Guevara everywhere, I don't know why.

As with all the developing countries and/or small countries I've visited, the Chinese Embassy is massive, and there's a few big building projects with large signs saying that they're supported by the PRC. Can someone explain that to me??

The people are very friendly, they seem genuinely pleased to see people, I don't know if that'll change when it finally gets discovered by travellers and tourists again, over the next few decades.

Today I'm going to the Indonesian embassy to try to get a visa. Word on the streets is it's easier here than in Australia (of course if you fly into Indonesia in designated airports like Bali or Jakarta you can get VOA, but the same does not apply if you come overland. Then I'll walk around some more, now that I've found a map. Dili has no street signs anywhere, and most people agree that they have little concept of addressing, but a population of over 100 000, so it's hard to find your way around without a map, which is what I tried yesterday. If I get time and motivation I might try to go out of town tomorrow for a couple of days. That looks nice, it seems that most of East Timor is covered with rather steep mountains. They look very wet, since it's the rainy season here.

I'll come back and write this up better with photos and all, but that might not be for a while.



A quick factoid about Darwin I should have mentioned in the other one ... Did you know that Darwin is closer to four other national capitals than to Canberra (and within 100km of the same distance as two more)?

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Comments

[Mark Daly]

Good luck
Sounds good. Have fun... I'm tracking your blog on RSS feed, so paying attention to what's going on!

[Elizabeth]

awesome
Sounds great, sounds fun. i get the blog updates to my work email