Crashing on the UN's Couch/DILI

I thought I was being very cool negotiating with that random motorcycle driver to pick me up in the morning. Making deals, improvising, international man of the people shit. Then it's 10 minutes past our arranged meeting time, and I'm forced to ask myself: why did I expect some random motorcycle driver to show up? I should've remembered my life is less fast-paced thriller, and more impenetrable Eastern European comedy of manners. It's not like I paid him in advance or anything, so he must just have a work ethic modeled after my own. I get another driver on the street, no big deal, and watch episodes of Treme at the Bali airport on my netbook, easy as you like.

With a few minutes to kill before boarding, I notice there's a cafe here serving Luwak coffee. The Luwak (the Indonesian name for the Asian palm civet), is an ugly opossum-looking tree critter that is fed coffee beans so that they can be pooped out and brewed after its particular digestive juices have worked some sort of voodoo magic on the bean. Needless to say, this coffee is very expensive, and breathtakingly trendy. It costs me $15 USD for a cup. I feel hipper than Zaphod Beeblebrox as I prepare to take my first sip. The coffee is certainly very smooth, and you can sense the underlying quality of the bean, but ultimately it was prepared badly and a burnt-tasting letdown. 

At least, I hope that's why it was gritty.

I've already secured a CouchSurfing host, Marcio, since East Timor seems a little more rough and unknowable than any of the previous countries I've visited, save Myanmar. East Timor is the newest country in the world, after all, and they almost certainly didn't get that way by asking politely. Might be good to have a home base. Marcio, who is in fact a Brazilian UN worker, picks me up at the airport and takes me to lunch before driving me back to his place.

Many of the buildings we pass are bombed-out husks, and Australian military personnel patrol everywhere.

Don't forget the slash-and-burn crop fires!

I think Marcio said the president lives here? Like, the president of the country? With a handful of bored armed dudes just sort of milling about outside.

All in all, nice place.

Pulling up to his house, Marcio points out two men in his yard wielding assault rifles and lounging in the sun as his UN-appointed bodyguards. Whoa. He gives me a short tour of the house, which is unremarkably house-ish, and then we have what was perhaps the most heavily guarded Young Indiana Jones DVD watching session in history.

The UN seems alright with me.

We go to dinner at a seafood buffet, which is way out of my price range. At the restaurant, we run into his scuba instructor who invites me to go diving tomorrow, which is way, way out of my price range. Fuck it. Money's just, like...a concept, man. After dinner, Marcio reveals that the only internet access in his house is through his iPad's 3G connection, which, if you've ever tried to use an iPad to connect to satellites in space from goddamn East Timor, you'll know is less than ideal.

This will be good for me. That's what Mom and Dad would say, and I've obviously followed all their life instructions to the letter. MOM AND DAD DON'T READ THIS.

I wake up early to dive with Dive Timor at a couple popular spots, Dirt Track and Bob's Rock.

Just once I would love to dive somewhere that Lars von Trier or David Lynch had named, like The Obscene Pinnacle or Screaming Gutter Reef.

These are reached by a shore dive, which is where rather than jumping from a boat you walk straight into the water from the beach, waddling awkwardly in your flippers and gear like some sort of British comedy sketch figure. The dives are fantastic. Beneath the surface sprawls rich, ragged beds of coral, blooming in sharp technicolor spires. Because the divers I'm with aren't using the hand signals I was taught to point out sealife, I nearly shove my face into a scorpionfish trying to figure out what a fellow diver is so excited about. Now, I'm no diving expert, but I can guess by the name "scorpionfish" that headbutting one would probably not be a great move for my face.

For lunch, we have fresh local fish from the villagers, eaten whole off the stick, plus some truly delicious coconut rice, biscuits, and cans of coke.

No joke, it's really good.

While we eat, wild pigs and goats come out sniffing for scraps.

What's up, wilderness buddies? You got this diving spot straight locked down.

During conversation, I discover one woman in our dive group doesn't know the children part of the Pied Piper story. You know, the end and entire point of the story. She just thought he cleared the rats out, and that was nice of him. Guess again, lady. I blew her mind with some stone-cold truth bombs.

It's barely noon when we get back to the dive center, so I'm left with a lot of time on my hands to check out what few attractions there are in Dili. There's a retrospective on the independence of East Timor at the library, but I can't find it, so I walk around town like an overly confident Alzheimer's patient. That is, lost and confused and a little scared, but damned if I'm going to let one of these strangers help me. There's also a boat you can take to see some other, cool island, but boats cost money. Take a word from Uncle Jamie: wandering aimlessly around a bunch of embassies is one free savings tip you can take to the bank.

This is a bombed-out church with what I hope aren't human bones tangled in their wall's rusted barbed wire.

Free Savings Tip #2: Sometimes people leave burned Vista install disc in front of Norwegian embassies. JACKPOT.

I hit up a bakery mentioned on wikitravel for my second lunch (or one of those meals that the British aristocracy/hobbits eat), and order some $5 pizza and a drink I've never heard of, "licar veiras". You might think I can't afford to be day-drinking, but I must repeat: it's a liquor I have not had before. If I'm not traveling to experience new things, what is even the point?

Whatever licar verias may be, delicious it is not.

With nothing else to do, I fuck around playing games on my mp3 player for a few hours, and walk back while listening to Morning Glory and Star Fucking Hipsters, another band Mathieu recommended. Unfortunately, it's getting dark, and soon none of the streets look familiar. A guy on a motorcycle stops and asks where I'm going. Fantastic, maybe he can give me a ride. I don't have a lot of money, but I feel lucky.

"Hi, where are you going?" he asks.

I tell him the street I'm looking for, but he doesn't know it.

Undeterred, he asks:"Do you want to go around with me?" What the fuck does that even mean, you...Oh no. He has a nervous yet expectant smile. God DAMMIT. What do I look like, one of those bendy sex monsters from Aeon Flux? East Timor was supposed to be different. I don't know what it is about me that screams vulnerable gay hitchhiker, but I would like it to stop please.

Maybe he was just a nice weirdo offering a ride, you might be thinking. You're free to think that. You're free to think that all the way into your own awkward sex nightmare. That's your right. As for me, I'm taking my genitals and going home. To Marcio's home. Once I stop being so stupid and lost.

A taxi stops for me, but he wants a stupid amount of money, and he doesn't even seem confident on knowing where the street is. This country the size of the Pizza Hut half of a combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell franchise can't have more than six streets, yet no one seems to knows the one I'm staying on. Maybe they hate Whitey. They've probably seen some shit. I should've gone to that library, so I could be more sensitive to their plight.

I'm able to find the general area where I remember the house being, but it's dark now and figuring out exactly which back alley leads there has me going around in circles. It seems like every house in Dili has a guard dog, and they are all super fucking pissed that I'm sneaking around their yards in the night. It occurs to me these people may have some problems with crime. It continues to occur to me that I'm lost in what could be a very dangerous place, and it just keeps getting later, and even if I'm not attacked by criminals I could be attacked by people thinking I'm a criminal and those dogs just keep barking and I wonder what their gun laws are here and hey I keep passing some real shady characters playing cards in the street and since I'm lost I seem to keep passing them and MAYBE I should ask for help. Wow that took awhile to occur to me.

There's a teenage girl watching TV in her garage nearby, so I walk up as non-threateningly as possible and ask if she has a phone I can use. She does. YES. I call Marcio. He doesn't pick up. DANG. THANK YOU FOR LENDING ME YOUR PHONE THOUGH, STRANGE GIRL. I KNOW I'M A LITTLE STRANGE, IT'S BECAUSE OF MY FEAR.

I'm gonna blow your mind with what happens next: things turn out okay. Wait, I'll back up: I keep walking and trying new streets and eventually a guy notices I'm lost and points me in the direction of "one of those UN houses". It's Marcio's house! His guard doesn't bat an eye as I walk up and inside. Marcio comes out, having just woken up. Apparently he thought I was already home and asleep, so he went to bed and didn't hear his phone. Oh well!

I wake up at 2 pm the next day, after the 3 Xanax I took to help me sleep worked a little too well.

Not that I need them, surrounded by such comforts and fineries known only by the highest of the Emperor's concubines.

I've got what Sarah calls a xanax hangover and Marcio's gone, but at least I've got the cockroaches in the kitchen and the lizards in the shower for company. I make some instant mie goreng for breakfast and watch Young Indiana Jones for further nourishment. The water in the shower ran out, so I have to wash using the bucket method, just like that Swiss-German guy in Burma. It's cold as hell, but oddly reminds me of my mom washing my hair in the bath when I was young. In other words, I have no idea what I'm doing and I just want it to be over and hair is stupid anyways who cares.

I do eventually leave the house, because I am ostensibly traveling here, and have myself some coffee and cocktails around town. Listen to more punk music. There are a whole bunch of roosters around the houses, which Marcio later informs me are all for cockfighting, at least the ones being well taken care of. There are copious betel stains on the ground, but I don't see it being sold anywhere.

When Marcio comes home, we eat some more instant mie goreng and watch more Young Indiana Jones. Turns out Marcio's an Evangelion fan, and we have a chat about all that entails. Being a cool dude, he gives me a copy of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, so now I have something new to read. I drink some Heineken and take more xanax. Look at me travel.

I only sleep in till 10 this time, and try to find the library exhibition again. I do not succeed. The days here are becoming monotonous: walk Dili Beach, punk music, drink a disappointing mocha, use the internet until it becomes so slow as to be pointless. At least tonight is Marcio's farewell party, so that's different. Dinner's at a Thai/Lebanese place (there's a niche for you), then a Brazilian cafe for the actual party. I get a ride with one of Marcio's coworkers to the cafe, but before we leave I have to help her check behind her tires for nails. She says kids here like to blow out tires for fun. Another coworker tells me about the time he and a bunch of others came out from eating at a hotel, with a walled, guarded parking lot, only to find every one of their cars with the tires slashed. Boys will be boys, snips and snails, they're the future...I have nothing to weigh in on this with, except an overabundance of white guilt, which almost always does not help.

Being the new guy in town, I have a lot of drinks bought for me, and I eventually leave Marcio to go with a couple guys to an after-party at someone's house. One of these guys mentions how he's seen both Pavement and the Pixies live, twice, so I know they're good people. I tell them the Brunei story, drink too much, and throw up in the bathroom. I cab it back to Marcio's (look at Mr. Moneybags when he's drunk!), but I don't have a key. I have to bang on the window for about 10 minutes before he wakes up and lets me in. I don't see the guard anywhere.

This may surprise you, but I feel like stale horseshit when I wake up. It sure surprised me; the Southeast Asia hangover buffer must be wearing off. Or I was wrong about some random Asian subregion conferring mystical drinking properties, but that seems less likely. Today's docket: sleep till physically impossible to continue doing so, pizza, coffee, mountain pilgrimage. The last one was not my idea.

No, it's dumb ol' Marcio who points out that Dili has their own Christ the Redeemer-like statue on an Eastern hilltop (I'm sorry Marcio, you're not dumb and I like you). At 27 meters tall, the statue isn't nearly as grandiose, but Marcio insists the view is stunning, and it's one of the premier (re: only) sights to see around here.

It's like Brazil's, only not as big or famous.

The walking path to the top takes less than an hour, and is punctuated by altars showing scenes from The Passion, or "Jesus and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day."

:(

It's nice! Again, this is like 50% of what there is to do in the whole country.

Just joshin' with the big J.

After hiking back down, we watch the sunset on the beach, which would be stunning if not for the cloud cover hiding the sun.

UGH gross

Marcio asks if I wouldn't mind tagging along to his UN office so he can finish some paperwork, and I gladly accompany him not only to print out some of my airline tickets, but also to see what this operation looks like. Turns out it looks like a bunch of barbed wire fences surrounding a drab collection of square buildings, trailers, and portables, not unlike a heavily-armed elementary school book fair.

This is inside the restroom trailer. The progressive UN not only provides condoms for their employees, but the sizes offered are very tactfully chosen.

We return to the beach where it's someone's birthday, but after last night I don't feel like talking to anyone, so I drink a cup of sangria by myself like...I got nothing. Just a guy drinking sangria alone on the beach. I feel like that's a pretty clear picture I've painted for you with my mind brush, no need for funny comparisons. One woman interrupts my solitude to talk about how lobster here is so cheap that at a previous birthday party, the host bought every guest their own lobster for dinner. Wow, that does sound like a better time than the one we're having!

The party eventually moves to the appropriately named One More Bar, where there's a house band doing surf covers, including a pretty good "Paint It Black." On offer is a $20 seafood buffet and awful orange juice. We move on, next is an expat joint that goes by Castaway. They have open mic, and some bearded asshole is playing "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." He dedicates it to his girlfriend, and I hate him. When he is done she runs up and kisses him, and people cheer. I want to take the stage and play acoustic punk covers as a punishment to this crowd for having different taste than me. It's possible that I am the asshole here. Whoa.

As I mull over which Dead Kennedys song to scream so as to elevate the crowd's taste/make them the most miserable, I notice that the guitar keeps going back and forth between the same two guys, Bearded Asshole 1 and Shaved Asshole 2. We're all assholes. Them, me. everyone everywhere forever. Marcio and I leave for home and together watch the last Young Indiana Jones episode. Emptiness overcomes me. Marcio's not an asshole.

In the morning my toothbrush breaks, so I tape it up while feeling something of that ingenuity-in-the-face-of-oblivion they must have felt in Stalingrad. Every morning, there are children screaming and babies crying right outside the window, or maybe I'm just noticing now that I've reached the double day hangover combo multiplier. Spirits aren't exactly high over here, I guess is what I'm getting at.

I do manage to pull myself out of my infinite ennui long enough to go scuba diving. On the drive there we get a flat tire, and then once in the water it turns out my regulator has busted fittings and leaks air, and ohfuckit none of my problems are real problems. It's nice and lovely and I see a big humphead wrasse and a titan triggerfish and they're just so neat you don't even KNOW. At this one spot we're given the choice to go left or right, and I go right, but this photographer went left so he also saw a peacock mantis shrimp and a cuttlefish, so I kind of hate that guy, but mostly because I wish I was him.

Our diving group grabs some beers together afterwards, and what a motley crew this is. There's an old metalhead from Baltimore, a Norwegian backpacker girl about my age, and a freaking Minister of Finance from somewhere else in Europe. The Norwegian girl says a guy in her hostel sounds like that Swiss-German builder-of-schools I met in Burma. I'm finding that lots of people seem to know a guy like him. Really, the only thing that could make a rich philanthropist like him more interesting is if he was an international con man traveling under the guise of a rich philanthropist. I think about meeting back up with Marcio, but the metalhead buys anther round, so I stay on this carousel for one more turn.

Hungry, we try to order some nachos, but the kitchen says they're out of chips. Adam, our divemaster, proves himself an advanced thinker by swapping the nacho chips for french fries. This move baffles and titillates the non-Americans at the table, but me and Baltimore exchange wise, knowing nods. The waitstaff is unsure when taking the order, until after talking to the kitchen they're convinced it's just crazy enough to work. When the creation comes out, it tastes about how you'd expect. Either you're American, and you can imagine what chili cheese fries with a few extra fixin's taste like, or else your country needs a Jack-in-the-Box, and you probably haven't understood how my whole Southeast Asia trip is a metaphor for Cinnabon, in which case you should know the Un-Americans loved the fries. They, whose poor fingers have clearly never been orange with Cheeto dust. They deserve not our pity, but our sympathy.

Uncomfortably full, I finally meet Marcio at Castaway for some last drinks, as I fly to Jakarta tomorrow. We drink some large Bintangs and talk about Evangelion. Once hungry enough (again, this is not my first nacho fries rodeo), we break for food at this restaurant called K-4 where a young local boy watches us eat. His face is prematurely aged by the sun, and his giant smile makes him look like a Timorese version of one of those demon children in the "Come to Daddy" Aphex Twin video. These aren't the kind of thoughts you have before a hangover-free morning, no sir. You're in for a dark hangover, full of terrors.

Children scream in the morning. No sleep. Marcio drives me to the airport at 10:30. The plane is delayed till 4, and one child in the lobby occupies himself by pushing a plastic chair around the gate lobby, which makes the most exquisite racket. I log into my email to find that my CouchSurfing host in Jakarta bailed. There is also no drinking water in the terminal, because this is hell. This is hell, and I was sent here because I was too good-looking and smart and charming for this world. If I could take ten years off that chair-pushing child's life and get rid of this hangover, I would.

We're fed in the airport at a quarter to 4, which is some small relief (not least because it comes with a tiny cup of precious, life-giving agua) right before my mp3 player runs out of battery, and then refuses to charge, likely out of sympathetic spite.

No.

Whatever it was that was preventing hangovers before, please I would like you to come back. I am undiscerning and open to any creeds or messiahs or animal blood rituals. Maybe travel fatigue is finally getting to me. It was only a matter of time. Only 3 countries left now, anyway.

I distract myself by reading Women, the Bukowski book Sarah gave me. It's the first time I've ever read Bukowski, and I'm 99% convinced I'm the only person who has ever understood him.

You know what? I actually didn't take any drugs here, and these last few mornings notwithstanding my drinking cooled quite a bit. All it took was the looming specter of bankruptcy, and literally the watchful eye of a UN representative. And now I feel horrible. The solution is clear: must flood body with lovely toxins once again. What's my next stop after a night in Jakarta- Singapore? They definitely sound like they party.

As I depart, I feel like I haven't delved very deep into the culture here, in the blog or the country itself. Still, I think there should be some sort of final word on my experience, so in my opinion they're good people, because of that one girl who let me borrow her phone. A+, would approach in moment of need again. The diving's good, and the Jesus statue is pretty big, as far as they go. Plan your vacation now!