Traveller's Tales - Chasseing Salsa in Dili

Published in 2010 by David Kay

I have a friend from Melbourne who loves to salsa. Recently she came to visit in Dili. “We’ll find salsa”, I said. There are Cuban doctors in East Timor and also a Cuban literacy program. Where there are Cubans there is salsa.

There is a bar in Dili called Motion. It is not far from the penthouse where I live. On Thursday nights they advertise that they have salsa dancing. I have been there a few times on Thursdays and there has been no dancing. There have been no people.

As I move into the darker side of fifty and the lighter side of sixty I sort of prefer earlier rather than later nights – especially during the working week. The same could never be said of Cubans. Nor of my salsa dancing friend.

I went to Cuba in 2004. Havana is a non stop dance and music club. It really starts to wind into full swing around 1 AM. This picture is from my Cuba collection.

Sometimes I forget which country I am in. So back to Dili. There had to be Cubans at Motion. So we went there the night after my friend arrived in Dili. We arrived at 8 in the evening. We were there. Also there was a local rock band warming up with “check 2, 3, check 7, 2, 3, check ch, ch, ch,” very loudly. I have noticed in a couple of places that live bands spend around three or four hours doing microphone checks and play for about 40 minutes. Once at a workshop one of the boys spent about an hour going “ch, ch, ch….” very loudly into a microphone. When the event started, none of us used a microphone. But it had been checked.

So we had a meal at Motion. 9 PM, no one there. Motion is a funny little place. I have been there a few times for various events. There is an outdoor bar and café where live bands play. One night the visiting choir from Melbourne sang there. There is a smaller enclosed room with a bar and a dance floor. It is a tiled dance floor. In a corner is a disco set up. I have been there before – once to see an Indian one man show which was terribly intense and depressing. I’d invited lots of people to come as well, thinking it was going to be a comedy. Instead it was an expose of torture and repression from around the world. Fun.

After our meal we went into the empty salsa room. Empty apart from the bar person. There was fantastic Cuban music coming from the disco set up. But a noticeable lack of Cubans. Usually people in Timor seem a little shy – especially in front of Malai (whities) and women are even shyer than men. The woman behind the bar though had a cheeky smile and was anything but shy. She kept telling my friend that the Cubans are coming, the Cubans are coming. Then she decided it was dancing time anyway so she and my friend chassed away to the Cuban music.

Staid working boy David had negotiated a 10 PM departure if the Cubans had not arrived. By ten they had not. Cheeky tried to drag my friend back into the salsa room by telling her that the Cubans are coming. As we walked out the door to the car park a group of 4 or 5 people arrived. We looked back and there was cheeky clawing at the fencing wire calling to my friend. “The Cubans have arrived, come back”.

So I relented and we went back to the salsa bar. There was one Afro Cuban and 3 or 4 white Cubans. My friend spoke with them for a while and then we left. But not before my friend had the names of other places in Dili for salsa.
After work on Fridays a group of us from the project and various other hangers on go out for drinks. We generally go to different places each week although we do have a few favourites. This time it was a Portuguese bar and restaurant on the sea front with fantastic sunset views. Afterwards we went a few doors down for a meal.

My friend had been told about a bar called Amigos. It was near the ANZ bank we were told. The answer to any question about location in Dili is “near the ANZ bank”. The ANZ bank is at a 4 way intersection. So it gives lots of flexibility. We found it on the third option. There was no one there. We later found out it doesn’t start till after 11 PM. Sounds Cuban to me. So second choice was a Portuguese night club called Casa Minha. When we arrived they were still serving meals downstairs. It turns into a night club later in the evening. What is it about all these late night starts? Did I miss something when I was growing up?

So we had a drink in the upstairs bar and watched all the beautiful people go into the night club below. By the time it started it was way past my bed time. There is always next week.

I live in an apartment compound very close to the centre of Dili. Near the ANZ bank – of course. I have a wrap around L shaped balcony with Roman columns. I call my apartment the penthouse because there is a view of the barren brown hills on one side and the Indonesian brothel on the other side. I call my landlady Lucretia Borgia. She screams at the staff. She is 45 going on 24. She and her husband are Chinese Timorese with Australian residency. He is back in Footscray where one daughter is at uni and the other finishing high school. He is building something in Footscray. Lucretia’s real name is Lucia (or maybe Josephine). She must like me because she did not rant and rave and scream when I said I wanted to leave earlier than I had at first told her.

As well as the wrap around balcony with the brothel view the penthouse boasts what a friend calls the Nero Suite. The en suite bathroom is fully tiled with a sunken bath. There are tiled steps leading up to the sunken bath. The bathroom is about the size of a terraced house in Brunswick.

The other thing of interest is that nobody talks to each other in the compound. There must be 15 – 20 apartments. But there is no common area and everyone keeps to themselves. I do know a couple of people. Below me in the “sub penthouse” are an Irish diplomat and his wife. Below them (that doesn’t rate a name) is an Aussie and his wife. The husband works on our project. In one of the other apartments is yet another Irish couple. She works for Irish Aid and her partner is trying to establish a Digicel presence here. They have just announced their engagement. Do you remember my Swan Hill mate from the last tale? His partner works for Irish Aid as well. What is Irish Aid doing in East Timor and why? I don’t know. Sinead (newly engaged) told me once but I could not understand what she was saying. I think there may be a Turk lurking around – someone smokes a hookah on his balcony. There is someone who drives a grey car with an EU sticker. There is an Aussie woman I know who works on a police support project. There are a whole lot of people I don’t know and have never seen. There is another grey car with a Cuban flag in the window.

I told my Cuban obsessed house guest about the Cuban flagged car and her eyes lit up. “Maybe he knows where the dancing is”. I did not know which his apartment was. But we worked it out and lay in wait to accost him. One evening we saw him driving into the compound. We had been to a Turkish restaurant and failed to get served. So my friend swooped on the potential Cuban before he could even get out of his car. Poor man. He had no chance. Anyway, he is Cuban and he is the number 2 man at the Cuban embassy. Two people work at the Cuban embassy, which takes the gloss off being the number 2 man. My friend wanted to drag him off to Motion the next Thursday. I wouldn’t say he was overly enthusiastic about the idea.

Over the weekend my friend went away to Baucau. She stayed with the Silesian monks. I think I once wrote about Baucau and the old Portuguese market. It is the second city of East Timor and everyone important seems to come from there. It used to be the capital. There are Cubans at the hospital there. My friend found them of course, but they were not dancers. Obviously they were not really Cubans.

So back in Dili we had one more salsa shot at Motion. This time we arrived a bit later. My friend had gone for a walk at sunset up to a Jesus Statue which is a well known landmark in Dili. It is sort of right at the tip of Dili so you can see a 360 degree vista of beaches and hills. A great place for a sunset, but 700 steps up and 700 steps back down. I watched the sunset from a nearby bar. It had an upstairs deck overlooking the beach and an old convertible car in the front yard. I don’t know why. The owner was called David. He is Chinese Timorese. He used to live in Williamstown and was educated at RMIT. He is a “business consultant”. He opened the bar as a business for his wife so she could learn more about business. Great views, but his wife does have a lot to learn. After I picked up my friend we went back there for a drink. My friend ordered gin and tonic. She was given a can of tonic and a bottle of gin. If you can imagine the scene below at sunset this is what the deck overlooks.

So eventually it was back to Motion in search of Cubans and salsa. It was the same deal as the week before except that this time there was a bit less “test ch, ch, ch” and a bit more playing at the outside bar. The inside bar had salsa, no people and the cheeky bar person. We sat outside and watched the band. After a while cheeky came out and started mucking around with the band’s microphone. She seemed to be trying to teach them a song. Then the band cranked up and cheeky became their singer. Talented woman. Bar operator, dancer, singer, spruiker.

During her stint as lead singer a Japanese woman and her Pakistani partner came to the inside salsa bar. The music seemed to change from salsa to swing. The Pakistani partner was the salsa and swing teacher. But I don’t think he was teaching this time. It reminded me of Sri Lanka. I used to work with a young woman who learnt Latin dancing from a Pakistani teacher at the American Dance School in Galle.
Back in the salsa - now swing room - the Pakistani and his Japanese partner were swinging away. Then they left. The band outside was taking a forty minute break to test the microphones, which they also did after each song. Cheeky was back at the disco machine in the salsa bar and the salsa was thumping out to an empty bar.

This time though, the bar was not quite empty. There was an Aussie dancing with cheeky. And sitting next to us was an Indonesian woman with her Portuguese partner. The middle aged Aussie could dance. That gave my friend the chance to dance with him and relieved me of a great burden.

So finally we had found salsa in Dili. We missed out on the dancing Cubans but we did find the numero 2 Cuban right on our doorstep. My friend had ticked off just about everything on her list of things to do and see in East Timor.

On my friend’s last night we ate sate at the beach. My friend was still determined to have one last Cuban experienced. So when we arrived back at the penthouse we knocked on numero 2’s door. I half thought he might have been in his pyjamas. But no, he very graciously invited us inside. He had a television with Cuban, Brazilian, Portuguese and Spanish stations. He thinks Obama says wonderful things but is still waiting for action in the embargo. He does not get paid for being numero 2 in East Timor. It is a civic duty. He is an expert in international relations from the university in Havana. He is also quite obviously a Fidel man. He gave my friend a DVD of Cuban music and he gave me a Cuban cigar. Someone once told me that cigars should be drunk with whiskey. Or maybe it was the other way around – whiskey should be drunk while smoking a cigar. Anyway, I don’t smoke so it was not really an issue. The whiskey on the penthouse balcony was nice though.

So, life goes on as an international advisor in Dili. Sometimes you can close your eyes and forget you are in the poorest country in the world where there is not enough food for the population, where the whole country’s infrastructure has been destroyed by militia or rioting twice since 1999. You could almost forget the illiteracy rate, child mortality, shocking school retention rates. You could almost imagine that there is no coating of dust all over Dili. You could almost imagine that there are jobs for young people or that there are teachers that have even rudimentary teacher training. A penthouse can be a wonderful thing sometimes.