Scintilla: Women who Stare at Goats

Making friends is often about finding people with similar interests to you. I have friends who write plays, friends who eat cupcakes at lunchtime, friends who smell the pages of secondhand books.

Now I also have friends who goat-spot.

If you turned my latest Timor road trip into a movie, it wouldn’t be On the Road or Thelma & Louise. It would be Women (& a man) Who Stare At Goats.

While most expat Dili-ites headed to Bali for Easter, me and five other intrepids hopped in a car and drove to Ossu, a small town in eastern Timor plentiful in huge pink grapefruits and daytime electricity (I think this is a new addition – everybody’s lights are on during the day because no one has had to have a light switch before).

While our destination was an eco-hostel on the edge of a waterfall, our journey included many delightful goat moments. You see, since arriving here I have developed a fascination with the knobbly-kneed niceties of this species. I guess the appeal is that I get an awesome kick out of seeing people (ie: animals) doing what they love. Dogs running on the beach, pigs sleeping, geckos gorging in a bin full of food scraps. It’s all in the same vein and yes, it does actually make me pretty ecstatic. It’s like the part of my brain that is meant to go ga ga over newborn babies of the human variety is wired wrong, and instead I go ga ga over animals having ‘aha’ moments Oprah would be proud of. For goats, they seem to feel that little bit closer to nirvana when they’ve got some elevation.

Goat on a tree stump. Goat on a branch. Goat on a tombstone.

These are just a few typical goaty places to hang out. Whenever I see a goat without a vantage point, they look distinctly unsatisfied, as though just a couple of inches off the ground would make their day so much better.

Goats in search of elevation

And when you do see a goat who’s got themselves a particularly good piece of real estate (they seem to judge their own efforts on dual standards of elevation and difficulty) they look so damn pleased with themselves.

The weekend did include other joys such as river swimming, Frisbee, double carbing it up at meal time, colonial photo shoots, an Easter egg hunt and G&Ts at sunset. But for me, it’s hard to beat the simple joy that comes from seeing a goat getting some air time.