Obrigada Timor Lorosae!

Turning 30 seemed far too simple and stress-free, so I decided to shake things up a bit by ducking up to East Timor to spend my birthday weekend with Romain. For those who haven't caught up on the goss, Romain is based in Dili at the moment on a short-term contract with the UN.

After a 20 hour trip from Port Vila through Sydney and then Darwin, I finally arrived in dry and dusty Dili, to be greeted by Romain and bizarrely enough, one of only two Ni-Vanuatu soldiers based in East Timor at the moment. He happened to be rostered on airport duty that morning.


A quick power-nap gave me the strength I needed to meet all Romain’s high-fallutin’ colleagues without making a dork of myself. We chowed down at the UN HQ cafeteria and then jumped in a UN truck and fanged off down the coastal road. Destination: Baucau, the second largest city in East Timor, and home to the Big Pink Portugese Palace – the Pousada de Baucau, where I was to spend my last couple of days as a twenty-something-year-old.

The trip through the countryside was amazing. East Timor is at the very end of its dry season at the moment so the place is wheezing for some water. The scenery is spectacular, and spectacularly dry!

Moo!

Baucau is lovely – mountainous and interesting. The Pousada was very pleasant and they served yummy Portuguese food ...

....although I think there was a bit of a miscommunication over the “cheese platter”.

Pics from around Baucau:

Bathing boys

Baucau kids with Bob

Fishmongers at the market

More market wares

From Baucau we took a day trip into the interior of Timor to visit the villages of Ossu and Venilale. I donned my newly acquired tais skirt (thanks Romain!) for the trip. Tais is the traditional woven fabric from Timor.

Here is a pic of a Timorese lady in the market weaving tais on her loom.

And here I am hanging with the local ladies in Ossu. Seriously – we were all having a good laugh until Romain pulled out the camera.

Romain had more luck cracking them up with his bad jokes in Portuguese (or were they good jokes in bad Portuguese?).

Beautiful buildings around Timor:

Boys with their donkey

Nearly everywhere we went we saw constant reminders of war. Smashed up buildings and burnt out houses and in some places just the heaviness of recent horrors.

But the people seem strong, both physically - all along the road side we saw people carrying impossibly heavy things on their heads - ...

...and spiritually. Still lots of smiles and curiosity with most people wanting to stop and chat to us ‘malai!’, which is tetum for 'foreigner'. We had this word shrieked at us constantly outside of Dili. In most places we visited we really were the only tourists, which was a strange but good feeling. We nearly always felt completely welcome.

But sometimes we had to accept that the love just wasn’t there!

After a trip through the mountains we came back to Baucau and Romain decided a dip in the ocean was just the ticket to freshen up.

I wasn’t so convinced.

Mostly because of this sign, which was 10 metres from the water’s edge.

Next day – back on the road and back to Dili town.

Stopping on the way for a swim (sans crocodiles) at One Dollar Beach, so named because the cheeky-yet-entrepreneurial local kids used to charge the expats $1 to not smash in their car windows while they went swimming.

That night Romain took me out on the town for a birthday feast of lobster and champagne!

Which nicely capped off what had been a wonderful weekend.

So Obrigada Romain! and Obrigada Timor Lorosae! (thanks Romain! thanks East Timor!).

My birthday was GUD TUMAS!

Tanna

Tanna: one of the most southern islands in the Vanuatu archipelago and an island with a big name around these parts. Anthropologists love it because it is packed with living tradition and ‘kastom’, tourists love it for the Mt Yasur volcano, and if you are ‘man tanna’ (or from Tanna) you pull some serious street cred across Vanuatu as Tannese people have earned themselves a reputation for being pretty 'tuff' - which is a useful bislama word meaning both tough and cool.

Tanna is also home to two extraordinary religious movements. The first – the John Frum Movement – fervently believes in a god-like figure called John Frum, who is depicted as an African-American World War II soldier and who, they believe, will return to Tanna on the 15th February (no year specified) to bring untold wealth to his followers. The John Frum Movement is one of the world’s more legendary ‘cargo cults’ – movements whereby followers attempt to obtain industrial goods through magic. Many similar movements sprung up around the pacific in the wake of World War II as Pacific communities were suddenly confronted with machinery and technology that they were unable to rationalise. Over 100 000 American soldiers were based in Vanuatu during World War II (the population of Vanuatu at the time was only around 45 000), bringing with them heaps of cool stuff like jeeps and radios and refrigerators. No-one is sure where the name John Frum came from, but people suspect it might have come from American soldiers introducing themselves – “Hi, I’m John From America”. As their primary interaction with white people prior to World War II had been with missionaries, colonists and blackbirders, Ni-Vanuatu quite reasonably thought that white people were incapable of treating them as equals and so they were truly impressed by the fact that white and black American soldiers appeared to enjoy equal status. Incidentally, Barack Obama is on his way to achieving God-like status in Vanuatu too.

Anyway, once the war was over, the soldiers packed up and left, taking all their gear with them. But the locals had been watching the soldiers, and they knew how to get the cargo back – all you needed to do was clear an airstrip and yell orders into a box and the planes would come. So they busily set about creating air strips, fashioning radios out of things like coconuts and bamboo and marching about in military-style regalia to entice John Frum back. They still conduct these military marches today, brandishing bayonets whittled from bamboo, and if any questions their commitment to this elusive John Frum character, they have been said to reply ‘well, some people have been waiting over 2000 years for their messiah to return, we have only been waiting for 70!’

The second notable Tannese movement is the Prince Philip Cult. A tribe on Tanna believe that the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, is a divine being (and also John Frum’s brother). Their ancient kastom stories included the tale of a Tannese son who travelled across the ocean to a distant land to wed a very powerful lady, but who would one day return and bring power and fortune to Tanna. When they saw the respect accorded to Queen Elizabeth II by colonial officials, they decided that Prince Philip was their man and the 1974 royal visit to Vanuatu was very much an ‘ah-ha!’ moment for the cult members. Now they are waiting for him to come back on a more permanent basis. There is an incredibly fun documentary called ‘Meet the Natives’ about their plight, which mifala highly recommend to yufala.

We visited Tanna a while back now – the volcano photos are from our trip. But we spent most of our time visiting a village and that experience warrants its own blog too. So here it goes!

Our friends Cara and Caroline were visiting from Australia and Cara had a family link in Tanna, so we all invited ourselves along for the family reunion.

We boarded this aircraft from Air Vanuatu’s fine fleet ......

...and after a very safe and smooth journey...

...we arrived on Tanna. We took a bumpy truck ride to our destination – King’s Cross Village – where Cara’s family put us up in these cute bungalows.

Alack – Cara’s uncle’s wife’s brother – took us under his wing. He proudly showed off his island and took us on a mammoth walk to the volcano.

I love this photo of Alack contemplating the mighty Mt Yasur. He said that, like most people in Tanna, he has a special bond with the volcano and he frequently makes the 15 km or so trek to the crater to just hang out.

In our brief time on Tanna we also got a glimpse of village life.

And his mum showed us how to cook lap-lap (a baked root-vege cake).

We were cooking in honour of Caroline’s 30th - birthday lap-lap, mmm mmmm!

We made a trip to the beach too. All the beaches in Tanna are black-sand beaches, courtesy of the volcano.


These kids were having a great time mucking around.

The ‘funnest game ever!’ was to run up into the bushes and find a mud pit and then smear the mud all over and then let it bake on your body before jumping in the ocean to wash it all off.

The place was pretty much pikinini paradise.

And we thought it was a pretty great place too!

The end!

Rush!