There are always plenty of Scrooges and Grinches at Christmas; no shortage of groans from party poopers on New Year’s Eve. But there’s something about the end of one year and the start of another that inspires hope and kindles the urge to make resolutions – to try harder, better, more often. Or maybe just to stop making silly resolutions and start living.
I am the master of vague resolutions – the type you can’t actually remember by year’s end and there’s no way of measuring your success at them anyway. Vague goal setting, and even vaguer goal scoring, is my game. Lately I admit I have been pursuing that most typical of all self-improvement efforts – being more positive. For about the thousandth time in my life. The latest trigger for this involved a man called Polly and a cafe called Victoria. But that’s another story.
Unbeknownst to me, my latest effort at effortless positivity was about to coincide with one of the most unrelentingly trying weekends I have ever had. Me and my partner-in-crime (see 12 days of Christmas) decided that the best way to celebrate being away from Sydney for NYE was to, well, get as far away from a typical Sydney NYE as we could. This involved getting to a remote town in the mountains.
1. Timor’s public buses give you a new appreciation for quaint things like movement, fresh air and time itself. In Timor, the term ‘bus’ has been appropriated to include large vehicles that traipse around the country with a vague aim to get somewhere, sometime in the future. After waiting almost an hour for our bus to leave Dili, we drove around for half an hour, picking up random people chauffeur style, before returning once again to the original bus stop. After a few more delays we were finally on the road out of Dili – only to stop reliably and regularly over 5 hours so passengers (or ‘my companions in purgatory’ as I came to think of them) could do their food shopping, have regular toilet stops, negotiate the price of the bus fare and buy corn from the roadside.
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| The 'bus' |
2. Walking to the top of a mountain to find you have no accommodation at the beautiful Poussada on top of said mountain may be disappointing, but it’s a great opportunity to have your alternative accommodation, a small house located on the other side of the valley, pointed out to you.
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| The Poussada has a garden AND dogs |
3. Staying across the road from a church blasting Christmas Carols, at a level which makes them indistinguishable from white noise, is a great opportunity to make ‘visions of sugarplums danced in their heads’ into a reality as you try and sleep.
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| Church/juke box |
4. A love of fireworks may be one of the few universal truths of human beings. Away from Sydney’s million-dollar harbour bonanza and Dili’s relentless firecrackers, I was looking forward to the peaceful silence of village life. However when the Christmas carols stopped, the homemade firework CANNONS started. Yes, that’s right. Firing explosives out of hollow wooden logs never fails to bring people together.
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| The prized village cannons |
5. Sometimes, you get exactly what you want. It just might not be what you imagined. Me and my partner-in-crime’s rationale was to get ‘as far away as possible’ from a Sydney NYE (which for the uninitiated normally involves overpriced tickets/hours dedicated to reserving 1 square metre of grass, copious amounts of alcohol, overcommitted, unreliable friends and sometimes even a sinking feeling). We got exactly what we asked for – with every warung in the village shut, we ended up eating 2 minute noodles and drinking shandies at 9pm, watching the entire village go to NYE mass across the street. When we went to bed (still in 2011 although I will say I was still awake when the clock ticked over) we were treated to the ‘party bulb’ – a light in our room which, thrillingly, changed colour. Again and again. Maubisse is clearly nothing if not a party town.
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| The party bulb |
For me, the first morning of the new year was bright, fresh and punctuated by the fantastic outfits the locals were wearing to church (notice a theme emerging?). Bright little girls in taffeta like starry-eyed asterisks, tall men in bellbottoms and cowboy hats like walking exclamation marks.
I was starting to like Maubisse, although as the time ticked by we were getting more and more anxious about how we were going to get out of there. Having discovered no buses were running that day (it’s a shame how I’m taking my normally shambolic approach to life and not adapting it at all even though I’m now living in a developing country and am sometimes responsible for visitors who have to fly home the next day), we had teed up a lift with a local guy. Our misgivings were horribly realised at midday when we were told, ‘Oh, you’re looking for Mosu? He’s already gone back to Dili.’
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| This is what happens when positivity meets Maubisse |
Thankfully our prayers were answered (perhaps a little too OBVIOUSLY, if you ask me), when a Jesuit priest in a pick up truck materialised. He was on his way back to Dili (which he thoughtfully described as “some kind of hell”) and we had a sweet, short (2 hour) ride back to the capital. This was my first time hitchhiking and to go with a priest, still wearing his robes from that morning’s mass, seemed ideal.
Back in Dili, happy to be home (yes, I have started calling it that), being greeted by cries of ‘Joey! Joey!’ and several snuffling pigs, I couldn’t help feeling pretty darn happy. And relieved. And exhausted. But because I’m being positive, let’s just stick with happy.
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