Would you like pork with your seafood?
Published in 2009 by David Kay
About nine years ago my partner Jane and I went to Tonga. It was for the millennia new year. We travelled with friends from Melbourne – one of whom is Tongan. For a while we stayed with Mele’s family on the island of Hapi’i. One of my enduring memories is of pigs wading through the sea shore snaffling fish as they went along. But this story is not about Tonga.
I have been in Timor Leste now for about two weeks. Apart from a couple of trips to Samoa I will be here for the remainder of the year. I am linguistically challenged. In Timor Leste, most people speak Tetun. The official language of government and education is Portuguese. Unfortunately, not every teacher speaks Portuguese, nor does every government official. Most people also speak Bahasa Indonesi. I speak English and a very little bit of PNG Pigin. Neither of which gets me all that far in Dili.
Dili is not what I expected. Much larger and much more infrastructure. That is partly because it is really a UN town. There is a multi national UN Police Force. There is also a local police force and of course the two do not communicate or trust each other. Around town there are probably 3 or 4 UN vehicles for every private vehicle. Because of the UN there is very type of restaurant you can think of (in addition to Timorese). Portuguese, naturally. Brazilian, Indian, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese, Thai, Aussie, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese and I am sure many others that I haven’t discovered yet. Likewise, there are bars of every type – including salsa clubs. Surprisingly, no Fado yet. It is a bit disconcerting to go to a bar and see the Aussie and NZ soldiers in battle fatigues and machine guns, drinking soft drinks. You can never forget how new this nation is and how conflicted it has been in the very recent past.
The streets of Dili are full of people and vendors selling water, soft drinks, fruit and vegetables, fish, batteries – anything you can imagine really. I have a car and there seems to be two road rules. The first is give way to any UN vehicles. The second is give way to any vehicle larger than yours. Or is it whoever gets there first?
Accommodation is difficult to find here and very expensive. That is because there are so many UN staff here that they keep the process high. UNPOL (that’s the UN Police) are beginning a staged handover to Timor Leste police. It will be interesting to see what happens when they leave. To both accommodation prices and to security. I managed to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in the middle of Dili. It came furnished, but I have to supply my own bedding, towels, cookware etc. There was a television. It had one channel. A mixture of Portuguese and Tetun. So I bought a radio so I can listen to Radio Australia. I then rented a cable TV box which gets about 60 channels. It is an Indonesian channel so the films are in English with Bahasa sub titles and about half the channels are Indonesian soapies. They look very much like any other soapie really. One channel plays a Korean soapie that I used to see in Samoa. It has Australia Network (for news, football and some ABC shows) and BBC and costs the earth.
Like Port Moresby and Apia, Dili has a sea wall and a road following the coast. There are groups of restaurant huts along the road that quite literally sit on the beach. I have been a couple of times to a Vietnamese one. I was there the other night when I saw out of the corner of my eye two dogs walking along the beach. The closer I looked I realised that there was one dog and one pig walking together. The pig was checking out the bushes at the back of the beach and then went to sniff along the shire line. It had changed colour since I saw it all those years ago in Tonga. And, understandably, grown fatter. I never knew pigs could swim so far. What I found a little disconcerting was the number of pork dishes on the menu.
