First a bit of a who, what, why..
This whole Timor thing came about, well actually I'm not sure where it started... but anyway for one reason or another Mat became interested in Timor, i think it was through his film contacts namely Nathan Phllips, who was an actor in the movie they made about what happened with the journalists at Balibo in 1975. Through making the film Nathan became friends with the Timor community, including the president Jose Ramos-Horta and Michael Stone, who is now Mats contact in Timor.
Mick has lived and worked in Timor for nearly 10 years i think Mat said, he speaks Tetum, the national language of East Timor and is (or was, not all that sure) one of the defence and security advisers to the president. He also started the 'Tour De Timor' bike race. Like they do the Tour De France, except in Timor, the main aim is to improve tourism in Timor, and therefore helping the economy and everything that comes with that.
For this trip Mat and i are going to be hanging out with Michael, photographing whatever and whenever we can, Mat is looking at this more like a working holiday, so he is hoping (and i think he will succeed) to shoot (for all you out there not a photographer reading this, 'shoot' refers to taking a photo, not shooting someone... just clarifying, this seems to freak people out when they don't really know what you're talking about..) a couple of stories and then sell them to either newspapers or magazines etc.
To be honest I'm not all that sure what my motivation is for going, i can think of a million reasons why it is going to be an amazing experience, but I'm not too sure what it is that made me decide to go. i am a little scared and freaking out a bit about it but so looking forward to it. I'll let you know when i figure it out.
So I'm leaving the country in 4 days.. awesome, except for the impending doom I'm feeling due to a severe lack of planning being really unprepared and having nothing organised...
Though on the upside we finally booked our flight to Darwin on Tuesday, I think Mat had really just had enough of my insistent nagging and freak outs about getting organised so we looked at flights. The original plan was to fly to Darwin early Monday morning and then continue to Timor later on in the day, but looking at flights we decided to go Sunday night, the flight worked out quite a lot cheaper and cheaper is always a better option... official flight time is 9.30pm Sunday night, arriving in Darwin at 1.25am (local time, which is +1hour) then to find something to do for 12 hours till the flight to Timor.
So far we have only booked our flights to Darwin, Michael is trying to work us out some sweet deal with the flights from Darwin to Timor, we think the idea is that we only have to pay the taxes, again cheaper is always better. We decided to take the later flight to Timor being that neither of us had ever been to Darwin before, good excuse to have a look around.
Still so many things i need to do...
- change over some money to US $
- register with smart traveller
- copy all my travel documents etc.
- stop mum from stressing
- decide what to pack
- pack
- unpack
- re -pack....
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