Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Im Not An Accidental Pirate..


so i know i haven't posted in a while, I'll give you a bit of a run down from Thursday night till now...
for some reason the formatting if really shit, ill try fix that later..

Thursday night was the first night in the week that the power hadn't gone off at about 4pm
so I actually got to cook real food for dinner! I made a green curry which was awesome,
it was so hot though, the curry paste I had really had some kick.

On Friday morning Mick actually flew into town! he obviously had a lot of people to catch up with
etc so we did our own thing for the day and met up with him later on.Mat and i again went for a wander
in Dili again, we found one of the many DVD shops and went a little nuts... i ended up with around 50
dvds and maybe 10 or so wii games.I'm really not that sure if they will actually work in my player,
apparently most do but you get the occasional one that wont. but when your paying 50-75c per disc
is a couple dotn work im not too worried. if customs confiscates them ill be pretty pissed though..
i know piracy is bad but i cant help it when they are so cheap!

Saturday was an absolutely beautiful day in Dili. Mat again had an early start. He got a
phone call on Friday that he thought was from a guy at the UN World Food Project, who he had
spoken to earlier, he thought it was to organize a meeting about doing some images with them
etc. Though when mat rocked up at the UN today they were like what? It's Saturday no one
is here...

He called the number back and they then said actually we are at Comoro come here.. When he
got there turns out it was a wedding.. In the end it was a guy we had met a few days ago,
he works as a guard at the presidents palace. mat ended up getting roped into shooting his
wedding. So he spent like 4 hours with him Saturday morning taking family photos etc.
It's kinda strange, there was about 20 or 30 couples getting married in the one
ceremony.

We were invited to their family ceremony /reception that night.. In-between the ceremony and
the reception thing we talked to Rich about it, he said this kind of thing happens a bit,
it's more so that he can brag to his friends that a malae came to his wedding. This
became very very clear once we got there. We were ushered in and asked to sit in a certain
lot of chairs, they then bought out a table and put it in front of us, we were like the
guests of honor, we even had waitered drinks service, it got weird. Walking into the place
it wasn't all that much different to a wedding reception that you might have in your
backyard in Australia, then walking around the corner and seeing the table which had the
food all already laid out, there was 2 or 3 full pigs on the table, a couple of chickens,
some sort of salad type thing and so so many flies... Mat took some photos for you mum...

They had clearly assigned a family member to look after us, every time we got up to look
around etc he followed us, he kinda started hitting on me, got awkward.. We wanted to just make
an appearance and then go, but when we floated that idea everyone got a bit upset, anyway in
the end we left and honestly couldn't get away quick enough.

i spent the morning while mat was at the wedding, chilling at the house. i was so freaking tired Saturday,
didn't sleep very well friday night on the account of mat
snoring and the stupid rat that is still lurking in our place. I even bought rat sack and it
still isn't dead!

After the wedding mat and I met up with Mick and Rich for dinner. It was probably the best
meal we have had in Timor. It was like a night food market, basically anything you could put
on a stick and chuck on the fire, we had squid, chicken, pork, and these amazing little rice
pudding things that were wrapped in woven palm fronds they were so so good.. The chicken was
butterflied and cooked whole over coals, with seasoning etc.. Wow. For 4 of us to have
dinner and 2 beers each (yes Ryan I had beer) it cost $11 total.

After dinner Mick and Rich showed us the nightlife of Dili.. We went to a couple of the
malae bars and had a few drinks, we then jumped in a cab and did a bit of a tour, went to
another random party and had another couple drinks..

Mum stop reading here..

Anyway we ended up dropping Mick back at his hotel and he told the driver where to take us
(Mat, Rich and I) he argued with Mick a little about how much the fare would be, he wanted
$20 for the trip. Usually that would be maybe a $5 fare. Anyway between Mick and the cabbie
they seemed to work it out, Mick said to us, pay him no more than $15. We got 3/4 of they
way home, just before the road turns really crappy so Rich said to him if he wanted to stop there
we would pay $10 and if he took us the rest of the way it would be $15.

well the driver didn't like this, he went a bit crazy, "no no you pay $20, $20!" Rich
argued with him a bit in tetum, from what we worked out later on, he was trying to say Mick
had said to pay $20. Because he thought we didn't understand his conversation with Mick.

Rich argued with him a bit more, he then turned the car around and started flooring it in the
other way, away from our place. We kept arguing, telling him to stop etc, he wouldn't,
and he wouldn't listen to reason or even take the money. Rich pulled his hand break and
yelled for us to get out of the car, I was in the middle in the back so I was so scared that
I wouldn't get out before he had time to take the break off and keep going, luckily he
stalled it so I did have time to jump out.

Mat and I got out on the passenger side, and Rich on the drivers side, as he got out the
driver swung around and punched him in the face, gave him a black eye, the driver went a bit
crazy, he was trying to punch and kick Rich so Mat and I were trying to defend him and stop him etc, was
crazy. where we ended up stopping happened to be out the front of the houses of a group of boys we
had made friends earlier, so they came out and held the driver back and told us to run. A
few of the boys ran with us down the road kinda like a guard. We have no idea what happened with the
driver. The boys said today that he just left. We think he was drunk which obviously
didn't help..

Further down the road another young guy who was friends with these guys took us into his
house, he was a Timorese guy who had been trained as a doctor in Cuba. He iced Rich's
eye and fixed him up, he was such a nice guy. This sums up the Timorese people. Always willing to help in any way
they can, absolutely amazing.

Ok mum your allowed to start reading again.

Sunday was a pretty slow day. We met up with Mick and had lunch, after having to jump start
his car he gave us a tour of Dili. It was amazing and at times horrifying to see this place
through his eyes. He drove us through a few sites of some of the worst Indonesian
atrocities, explaining the history of places, pointing out good places to eat, a good hairdresser and just generally giving us a outlay of the place.
one of the places he told us about was Santa Cruz, there was a massacre here in 1991, it really changed they history of timor.
where it happened is a road between 2 cemetery's so for a 100m stretch there is reasonably high walls that kinda box you in.
basically what happened is there was a group of students peacefully protesting, the death of one of their friends, who had been killed by the Indonesian police.
instead of allowing them to protest peacefully then leave, they were ambushed by the Indonesian military. they lined up and hid on each side behind the cemetery walls so that the students didn't know they were there and blocked then in and started firing, nearly 250 people were killed at this site, then up to another 200 more were hunted down and executed.
it was absolutely horrific, though this changed the course of the war, and was the tipping point for the retreat of Indonesia and the push towards Timors Independence. i didn't explain that very well, look at the wiki page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Massacre

While driving around the stories Mick was telling were chilling, talking of driving down a certain street in 2006 and for every house to be on fire, bodies lying across roads, absolutely horrific.
he told us about riving down a a road that was in the Badlands, where no one would go, not even the Australian military were allowed to. he was driving one day and was stopped by a heap of big 44 gallon drums being rolled it onto the road, then saw in his mirror that more were being rolled out behind him, and having a gang appear with baseball bats and anything else they could find to beat the shit out of his car/him etc..; the only thing that saved him was the fact that he had been basically the face of Australia on the news/radio throughout the retreat of Indonesia and the peacekeeping of the Aussies. they said to him, if you were anyone else we would have fucked you up..
we drove around for a few hours with him telling us many stories like this. crazy man.


I'm gonna post this for now and add part 2 later on.. Mat is hungry so were going to get some lunch.








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