Rolling Stones

I arrived back in Dili almost a week ago, touching down onto the small runway with a pang of reticence that had been entirely absent on my return from exile in Jakarta.

My holiday in the Northern Territory (NT) was wonderful. The blinking screens and thumping, shuddering air conditioners that occupy my days in Dili were replaced with wildfires, arching blue skies, and the scream of the Rolling Stones as I covered over one thousand kilometers with L in his bootstrapped 4WD.

I can’t get no… sat-tis-fact-ion…

NT felt huge and oddly empty compared to Timor. Camping out in ‘the bush,’ I kept expecting to wake up to see a line of curious children and walleyed goats sitting outside the tent. On the escarpment we drank the water from the streams because there isn’t anything up there to contaminate it – a new experience for me as in coastal Maine rainwater is no longer safe because of industrial pollution and in Vermont we worry about effluent.

All the sounds and little rituals of camping, for example the snap of tent poles coming together, set my thoughts rushing back: my petite dome tent in the Yukon-Kuskokwin delta of Alaska, tarps plastered with wet pine needles at Merck Forest, sharing the green Eureka tent with dad at the farm, etc. I spent a lot of time thinking about my summers growing up.

Despite the flush of nostalgia, there were parts of being in NT that felt totally foreign – crocodiles, for instance. Off the escarpment, there is no gadding about near the water’s edge, no trailing a foot or finger in the water. This took a while to internalize, and it was sometimes frustrating to reconcile my general confidence with my clear lack of NT-specific smarts. Lots to learn.

Amidst the euphoria of big landscapes and straight, smooth roads were smaller moments. I did a fair amount of bird watching (not really a lot of listing, though) and it felt good to get lost in the minutia of plumages, rendered close by my scope. As L said, they (the birds) don’t do much. And sometimes that is precisely the point. A long look at a new dove; drinking tea with Tasmanian honey; warming up on rocks after a swim – non-events that feel intimate.



Now back in Dili, it has not taken too long to reconnect with the people and things I love here. The markets are more full and beautiful than I have seen in months: the avocados have tight and glossy purple skins, and Timor’s stubby bananas and zaftig tomatoes make a mockery of stiff supermarket produce. I am back typing away about elections trivia, and I am already anticipating sorting through the inevitably (tantalizingly) convoluted results from the parliamentary election (30 June 2007).

There is something nice to coming back to my simple routine of passable coffee in the morning and a crossword puzzle before bed. However, that is not to say that I couldn’t have done with a few more weeks tromping around Kakadu National Park and drumming on the dashboard while yelling with the Stones:

… hey hey hey, that’s what I say… I can’t get no sat-tis-fact-ion!





Photos: From top to bottom - Kakadu; checking out the Forest Kingfishers in Kakadu; walk into Kakadu; White-bellied Sea Eagles throught the scope; calm waters in Litchfield; the group hiking into Kakadu; upstream from Yellow Waters.