Scintilla: Don't call me Junior

Sometimes driving in Timor feels like one long off-road training course. This morning as I was backing out of our house (a narrow path – taxi and tomb on the left; pigs, chickens and dogs on the right; children and makeshift soccer goal posts directly behind) it occurred to me that I may have to find a new hobby to do with all the spare time I’ll have once I move back to Australia and no longer have to do 62-point turns every morning.

On the weekend I had my first district-driving experience when I went to Gleno – the fabled home of my friend Heidi, temporary Glenoian but Melbournite at heart. According to my odometer, Gleno is 45km from Dili. It took me 1 hour and 45 minutes to get there, which equates to an average speed of around 26km/h. I can’t remember when I would have cracked 20km/h, but maybe it was in the airborne periods as I was flying from pothole to ditch and back again.

Within the first 30 minutes out of Dili, I’d almost been run off the road by a government car, come way too close to hitting a motorcycle, and heard several discouraging sounds from my car. The air con is feeble at the best of times, so I had the windows down and could hear the car’s progressively louder groans as I got higher up into the hills.

I felt I was just getting the hang of it when I turned a corner to find the road submerged in water. Unfortunately my photo doesn’t do it justice – or maybe it just looked worse at the time due to my stress levels. When I made it through, I confess I had a bit of an Indiana Jones moment – 'don't call me Junior!' By the time I returned the next day, some local men had started fixing the road, for which they stopped me and extracted $5 while holding large sticks. It’s Timor’s version of Macquarie Bank.

Really, it looked worse in real life

Gleno itself was much more relaxing, and included a cameo appearance as the token malae at a local wedding. Instead of sugared almonds, guests were presented with cigarettes and the dress code was apparently ‘hoodie and jeans’. I had very little idea of what was going on – for the first hour I thought the groom was one guy (‘oh, he looks so nervous, how cute!’) who later turned out to be an ordinary guest. The bride briefly cried (not from happiness, probably from having to leave her family) but she got into the spirit eventually. Indonesian muzak will do that to you.

Give me a dirt floor wedding any day. But I’ll take a tar road, thanks all the same.