Tales of Timor-Leste - Part 2

Maubisse, Mt Ramelau and Hatubilico

I’m not sure whose idea it was to have the road zig zag up the mountain. Almost immediately past the market in DIli, past the other market and the mikrolet loading station, the road climbs steeply into the hill, clinging to the corners as if hanging on for dear life. It’s a “good road”, meaning, the potholes don’t come all that often, the road is ostensibly sealed, and you can, at most times, fit two cars for dual-directional traffic. Notwithstanding, the space between two cars and the respective edges of the road isn’t significant, and it’s a bit of a nerve-wracking endeavor. The road climbs and climbs and climbs, hairpinning back and forth above Dili. On each side, accessible from staircase-like little steps or trails, are houses and even the occasional palatial building. Mikrolets, buses, trucks of all kinds, 4x4s, and even the occasional taxi venture up this road into the mountains of Maubisse; below, Dili in all its grubby glory stretches along the waterfront in both directions ending at the Jesus statue in the East, and with the wisps of Autauro visible in the distance. It doesn’t take long before the city becomes a distant view, and the vistas are more green hills, forests, and little streams running along the waterway.

Our endless ascent in view of the city eventually becomes only little thatched buildings and rice padies, with cattle and increasingly horses visible in the muddy fields and paddies. Goats, children, dogs, and chickens line or, alternately block the road, but almost nothing looks like something you might term a settlement. Occasionally, roadside stands would sell a few vegetables or bananas or the ubiquitous greens, or litres of gasoline in old water bottles. Sometimes, the road would disappear entirely, to be replaced by a muddy, rocky stretch with massive potholes. Almost worse were the sections where a narrow strip of pavement continued through the rough patch, with the respective potholes dropping off deeply to each side. There is no good path through it and it’s a bumpy ride either way. At one stretch, a group of youths had placed some branches on part of the road, and waved us aside; when we stopped, the one of them peered into the window. He had on a baseball cap perched high on his head, or maybe not, and a pair of jeans; he grinned. “Money,” he said. We didn’t really understand. “Money, one dollar?” he continued hopefully. “No, I’m sorry,” we replied, and continued. I couldn’t tell if they were shaking down the road on principle, or if they were just opportunists seeing a pair of Malei (foreigner). Traffic became more sparse, which was a relief, as the potholes often forced one or the other lane into oncoming traffic, most curves were blind and the trucks seemed improbably large for the road. People walk along the roads, and when school lets out, the trickle of pedestrians becomes a steady stream of schoolchildren. On the road before Maubisse, we suddenly found a truck coming around the corner in our lane; in the truck’s lane, a line of schoolgirls dived screaming into the ditch as the truck sped past. If they hadn’t jumped, they’d have been hit.

Maubisse was the first thing you might call a town that we had seen, discounting Ainaro (which one shouldn’t, but Maubisse is considerably bigger); it had a church, whitewashed and solemn among the hills. The air was cooler, blowing in from somewhere higher up and bringing mist, moisture and the chill of the mountains; after the almost oppressive heat if Dili, I relished the goosbumps and the beads of moisture on my arm. Guesthouses ringed the church, boasting beautiful gardens and the quiet serneity of a place—from my perspective, at least—far away from anywhere. A crowd of kids collected around us, posing for photographs, and waiting eagely for their chance to see their faces in the tiny screen of the digital camera.

From the church, a winding road heads down to towards the marketplace, dropping violently, as if the pavement were rippled, giving us place to park amidst the several stalls selling veggies and bananas. We head towards the “only” restaurant in Maubisse, recommended in garbled portuñol by the old man at the guesthouse. It’s behind the market stalls, dimly lit and containing a few tables and plastic chairs. Before the window, a row of women sit, chewing betel and selling their wares. We sit next to this window, and only a few inches away but separated by the pane of glass is an old man, with wild eyes and wild hair. He waves, saying something in Tetum. I wave back, but he persists, waving wildly. I don’t know what he wants and can’t find it out, so I preoccupy myself with my coffee and ignore him and the curious stares of the market women.

About five kilometers beyond Maubisse, the road to Hatubilico splits off from the main street, and we look back on the road from Dili as a happy memory. This road, insofar as you can call it such, was more or less flattened collection of stones, sending us bouncing and jolting along up and down and around. Sick of slipping and scrambling I put on the four wheeled drive, and the remaining eighteen kilometers more or less proceed in first and second gear, taking over an hour. The hills fell away to either side in verdant green. On the corners, a waterfall or stream trickled down across the rocks and into the distance. Occasionally, a traditional hut would appear out of the mist, clinging to a hillside, forlorn amid a backdrop of white, only to disappear again. We could have been in the middle of nowhere; near and far there were nothing, not even houses the last few kilometers. An old woman and a small boy were carrying heavy sacks, heading into the mist, and the kid flagged us down. We cleaned out the back seat and they pileed in. The old woman is wrapped in a tais, traditional skirt, her head wrapped in another cloth, with lips stained crimson from betel juice. The kid hung on the back of my seat with giant eyes, staring with excitement at the rumbling brumbling diesel motor pulling us along the mists. We stop at the next cluster of houses and let them back out; as soon as we are stopped, the entire youth population of the hamlet piles out and surrounds our car, calling out in Tetum, grinning and whooping wildly. We wave goodbye and continue on.

They say the temperature drops with the sun; it also drops with altitude, and the air turned chillier the higher we went. A couple of times we stopped by passerby and asked “Hatubilico?” Always, they waved us on. We reached the town, wondering how we would ever find our guesthouse, our pousada, when we saw the giant yellow structure with a sign to that effect. It was in the “middle” of town, past the small cemetery of concrete crosses huddled on a flowered knoll and across from a shrine set high into the hillside and accessible from a set of irregular concrete stairs shrouded in flowers. We parked. We knocked. We wandered around, peered in the windows, knocked again, tried all the door handles, and still no one. Eventually two younger guys wandered by, and after we managed to explain what we wanted, one of them jogged off down the road, returning with a pair of keys.

“We found the Shire,” M. said, referring to the land of the hobbits in Lord of the Rings. We had found a town with no tourists, no restaurant, no café, no post office, and no electricity. We followed the one path down towards the cemetery, looking out over the valley and the mountains beyond. Next to the cemetery, an older guy was digging around in a flower or vegetable bed, looking at us with some measure of suspicion. A pony tethered nearby let me stroke its nose, though the halter had rubbed its face bloody it was still friendly. On the other side of town, rolling down from the mountains and set in a giant green carpet adorned with rocks was a little stream, which passed under a stone bridge to continue down into the valley. Wildflowers were everywhere, and only the occasional crosses set into the side of the road—and the frequent cemeteries—gave hint of a haunted past.

On the road we ran across César, the son of the pousada-owner, who agreed to guide us up Mt Ramelau—we’d meet at 4 AM—and told us his mum would cook us dinner at nine; the dinner, as it turned out, arrived on its own about 7:30, carried by a small procession of little kids. The pousada itself was a solid structure, newly painted a bright yellow, and featuring many small rooms with many small beds. Communal toilets and showers downstairs. A big room at the end of the hall offered an impressive view out over the valley, boasting a table, a set of chairs, several low couches and, surprisingly, several treadle-powered sewing machines made in china. The funny thing about the big room with the sewing machines is that nothing matched. There were at least two different patterns of wallpaper, both yellow, and a different pattern on the ceiling. The ceiling itself wasn’t straight, and nor were the several columns parallel or perpendicular to each other, the walls, or the ceiling. We ate our dinner of cabbage, potatoes, meat of some kind, and rice with a certain relish, prepared our things, and went to bed.

At 3:45 our alarm went off, and we groggily got up, got dressed, and got packed. The moon was mostly full and we could see without a light, so we spent a good bit of time gazing over the moonlit valley, attempting unsuccessfully to take pictures of said moonlit valley (as you can imagine, the pictures were predictably just black), and eventually going back to bed as 4:30 rolled around and César still wasn’t there.

Sometime around 6:30 I awoke to someone looking in our door (which I thought we had locked), knocking and demanding insistently we get up and go: César had arrived. Apparently 4:00 means 6:30 around here, or our mixed portuñol-English-(his)Tetum had led to a misunderstanding. M. gave me the keys and wedged himself in the back, as César directed me and the car up the steep and steepening hill. The road lurched up into a green meadow in the pre-dawn, the road curving suddenly around almost imperceptible corners, and I desperately hope my sleep-fogged brain reacts sufficiently. At one stretch the wheels don’t grip, and despite the fourwheel drive the car begins sliding left with each attempt. I finally roll back a bit and give it another go, hoping to get enough momentum to make it up. Coming around another curve, I see with dismay what looks to be a washed-out corner—not too uncommon—looking like a dangerous bridge which I am convinced will crumble under my car. César gets out and guides me slowly around the left-hand corner; my right bumper is almost brushing the rock face. We make it.

We make it up to the meadow, scaring off the few grazing horses at our approach, and begin the climb up a set of incongruous stone steps. For my part, several months of good food and no sports have taken their toll, and I find the hike a challenge, though the path itself is neither particularly tricky nor particularly steep, and I need a lot of breaks. César bounded up like a mountain goat and even M. was soon out of sight up the hill, but my legs wouldn’t get me up any faster.

The valley fell around us like a set of green curtains. Trees, and trunks of former trees scattered the hillside. We could see for practically forever, and everything was a brilliant, emerald green. Little wispy clouds floated by, hinting at fog to come. Towards the top, an abandoned hut stood forlornly amid several wooden crosses; I didn’t dare ask what had happened here, but César did tell me the crosses were grave markers. There were several along the path. At the point I wanted to send the others off, so they wouldn’t have to constantly wait for me, they pointed to the crest of our hill—which I was sure was just the next of several ridges—saying “that’s the top”.

And the top it was. Unfortunately, for all we saw at that point, it could have been a statue of the Virgin Mary set in or on a cloud; the mist, by now, had rolled in and completely obscured the view. We sat on the top, and we could have been sitting on the edge of the world. Beyond us was nothing; the ground fell sharply away below us, but even after five meters the view became a milky white. Nothing. But as we sat, munched our rolls, drank our water and caught our breath, for a few seconds at a time the mist cleared and we were granted glimpses of the incredible valley so very far below.

Our descent, predictably, took almost no time, and soon we were back at the pousada, consuming our breakfast—coffee and rolls had been left for us—as an old woman with a betel-mouth wandered in and out, tested the sewing machines and grinned furiously every time I looked at her. A betel-mouth looks as if she had recently bitten a live animal or moonlighted as a guest star in a vampire movie—it’s all a bit disconcerting to be viewing over breakfast. We tried to find someone to pay for the rooms, eventually driving down to their house and finding the same old woman. M. paid her for the room but, as we discovered most of the 18 kilometers later, as she forgot to ask for the keys and he forgot to give them, we had taken the keys with us.

Sometime past one of the last groups of houses, we were suddenly surrounded by a mob of kids yelling “photo! Photo! Photo!” Not really wanting to stop and not sure what they wanted we continued. But the mob didn’t give up, and soon we had an entire flock of children running after our car, shouting and screaming. Several of them made it at least a kilometer or two, which of course gives you some indication of how fast we were going that they could even keep up. Here and there we passed villagers transporting various goods with ponies; the ponies, for their part, were not particularly excited about the passing car but we managed not to set off any major wrecks or scare off anyone’s pony. After the eighteen kilometers of rocks and potholes, the main road—with its crazy traffic, trucks, mikrolets, potholes and missing bits—seemed like an Autobahn in comparison and we set off happily.

Sometime after Maubisse I took over the wheel, and of course, promptly the sky fell in and we found ourselves inching through a deluge. The road is narrow and set very closely to the hillside, and there is nothing that one might confuse with a ditch, a culvert, or any other means of dealing with rain; the result of this, of course, was a waterfall streaming onto the road at every corner. The potholes became small lakes, which one could never tell if they were potholes or puddles. Rocks and shrubbery were washed into the road, and as we continued, we had the impression that more of the corners and edges of the street had crumbled since we passed the first time. Even stopping the car and waiting for the deluge to pass didn’t seem to help, so we continued. As a highlight, however, were the stretches where the road was completely missing, to be replaced by muddy troughs where the wheels had passed, which by this time had filled with water. Ready, set, go! M. hit the accelerator and we went skidding through the mud, splashing up water on over the roof and generally enjoying ourselves immensely. Mit Gewalt geht’s. Finally, finally, after what seemed an eternal number of hairpin turns, we made it back to Dili as the rain cleared.