Road Trip

“I’ th’ East my pleasure lies.”

(Antony and Cleopatra, 2:3)

Just back from a massive, wonderful road trip to the far eastern tip of Timor Leste. Sunburnt, tired, feeling happy to have had such harmonious companions, I am settling back into Dili.

As always, going away shows me where I came from. The daily security concerns of Dili, the restaurants with beautiful lattes, the peacekeepers in the supermarket check-out line, the foreigners, and the two-story shops – they all have a certain bizarreness now that I have seen that they are truly endemic to Dili. These quantities have defined my life in Timor Leste, and now they seem strikingly exceptional, atypical.

I will write more about the trip, but I just want to mention that I was able to visit the NDI security guard, Eugenio, who had been so kind to me in my first weeks here. We visited his town of Poros and sat in his home for an hour sipping sweet black coffee and shooing flies off of the plates of cassava.


Above is a rough map of the trip.