Darwin to Kupang
March 1st
New Moon
We flew out of Darwin on Merpati flight MZ841 at quarter past three in the afternoon. The flight lasted an hour and a half and the time difference between Darwin and Timor was an hour and a half too, so it was still quarter past three when we arrived in Kupang.
The small plane was less than half full, so we didn't take too long getting through passport control, even though we were last in the queue. But we had to change some money and somehow, despite only having hand luggage, we ended up being the last passengers to leave of the airport. Of course this meant we got mobbed by all the taxi drivers and hotel touts who were still waiting there, as we were their last prospects for the day! In fact their last prospects till Saturday at that airport, which was when the next flight from Darwin would arrive.
The taxi drivers wanted 7500 rupiah to take us into town, which seemed like a lot at the time, although later, when i was more used to the money, i realized it wasn't as much as i'd thought. Anyway, due to being a bit overwhelmed by the mob, who i spent a while talking to, and laughing and joking with them, we decided to walk out of the airport.
A very persistent man called Martin was the only one of them that followed us and we took a short cut from the airport carpark, along a muddy path through a paddock to the road. A couple of kilometres down the road, at the first junction, we caught a bemo, the local public transport, a bit like a minibus, which cost 1000rp each - way over the odds, but still less than a dollar.
Martin was still with us when we got off the bemo. He wanted to take us to a homestay, presumably to get some commission, but we really wanted to find somewhere on our own. We took him on a long walk round the town, but somehow we ended up in the homestay he wanted to take us to anyway, for lack of anywhere else to go. It was a bit strange, as he didn't seem to have any connection with the place and didn't even seem to know exactly how to get there! Anyway we were buggered and disorientated and took a room there for 4000rp each per night. Martin still hung around and i gave him 5000rp which made him happy and he went away.
He'd offered to let us stay at his place out near the airport, but it was a bit too far from town, and anyway, seemed a bit too difficult to accept and offer like that, at that time and under those circumstances.
By this time, Nicki, who'd never been out of southeastern Australia before was fully culture-shocked and totally spun out.
The light in the room didn't work, as the wires had been ripped out of the bulb holder and Robbo, a boy who lived there, came in with a screwdriver and tried to take the socket off the ceiling. He was trying to turn the screw the wrong way and i had visions of him electrocuting himself as he obviously didn't know what he was doing (one of my trades is electrician). So i asked for candles instead.
However, he came back with a bulb holder on the end of some cable and was trying to hook that up. I eventually did it for him and we had a new light fitting, with no switch - you had to unscrew the bulb to turn it off.
Then granny wandered over and stood outside the door to have a look at the strange foreigners. She stood there studying us for quite a while, in what was a friendly and relaxed manner really. But when you're not used to people who just stand and look at you like that, i can be a bit disturbing. I could feel Nicki thinking "i wish they'd all just go away, i can't handle it!"
In Kupang, all the roads seem to change name every kilometre or two - as if there were more fascist generals, whose arses the administrators needed to lick, than there were roads. But the homestay was somewhere around where Jalan Urip Sumoharjo became Jalan Ahmad Yani. It was up a very rough, rocky path and consisted of a collection of sheds around a courtyard with a well in the middle. The well was fairly full of clear water. But it looked like it went quite deep - and it would be a lot further down to the water in the dry season.
Our room was one of two ground floor rooms in a small two-storey block which backed onto the well. The kamar mandi, or bathroom, was up a couple of crumbling steps just off the courtyard and had half the tin roof missing, which didn't matter much as the toilet bit was covered. What a pleasant change it was to be in a country with civilized toilets! Squat toilets and water to wash your arse everywhere. It was a shame Australia wasn't like that, i thought!
On the way to the mandi there was usually a fire burning under a tin roof, with a couple of kittens lying by it.
- - -
I felt quite a considerable "culture shock" when we walked around Kupang that afternoon - more than i would have expected, more than i could ever remember feeling anywhere else, except when i'd caught the ferry to Tangier from southern Spain in the early 80s. I thought later that a lot of it was probably caused by picking up on the way Nicki was feeling.
The contrast between the blank and meaningless, post-cyclone-Tracy architecture of Darwin and the crumbling, post-dutch colonial architecture of Kupang was probably more disorienting because they were only an hour and a half's flight apart. I was used to having a much longer transit time to get adjusted, going from a rich to a poor country. And Kupang was probably the most neglected city i'd been to. It was really obvious that Timor was at the arse end of the javanese empire.
- - -
That night, i was really buggered, but i didn't sleep very well, the same as the night before. However, that was what it was usually like for me at new moon. The next morning i woke up feeling a bit less disturbed. The homestay looked less weird that morning. I think i'd sort of jumped the cultural barrier in my sleep.
It's a weird thing, culture shock. I'd never been so conscious of it before as i was that first period in Kupang, although i'd certainly experienced it plenty of times. Even though i knew it and recognized it, i'd got no idea what it really was or why it affected me. I was certain it wasn't something visual. I was quite accustomed to finding myself in different surroundings and weird places. It was either an unconscious freak-out at arriving in such a dramatically different place, which i doubted, or it was some kind of psychic confusion caused by suddenly being surrounded by people thinking in such a drastically different way to the people you were accustomed to being around. Something like a psychic "seasickness", where your eyes are telling you one thing (that it's not really very different) and your intuitive senses are telling you another (that it really is very different). I suspected that if i could have shut off my consciousness of what others around me were thinking and feeling, it would go away.
Nicki was still a bit spaced out, but she was feeling a bit less weird too. We went out and found a restaurant for breakfast. It was about ten o'clock, but we had a beer first. We ordered nasi goreng (fried rice), tanpa telur, tanpa daging (without egg, without meat) and gado-gado (an indonesian salad). The rice came, but the gado-gado never did. Oh well... We had another beer instead.
After breakfast, we walked to the market, which is near the beach, on the way out of town towards the airport. It's a fairly typical market, i suppose. A lot of vegetables, not much fruit, a bit of meat, tofu, tempeh, cigarettes, clothes. It was pretty scummy and it reminded me of Ridley Road market in Dalston, London, for some reason. We walked around the market to cries of "hallo mister!", "hallo missus!", which is a universal greeting for foreigners in Kupang, and appreciative comments about my tattoos.
Nicki started spinning out a bit at the market, but we wandered around for a while and bought three avocadoes and some tempeh. The avocadoes were really disappointing, watery, tastless and not really ripe -just bruised, so they felt like they were. They were totally inedible really. But the tempeh was nice. It was wrapped in palm leaf and chopped off at a sharp angle at each end. It was different to what you normally get in Australia - more like the sort some friends of mine in northern New South Wales used to make - with thick growths of oligosporus rhizopus (or whatever it is) and not such thickly packed beans. It needed to be fried really, but it wasn't too bad raw.