Kupang
March 3rd
The Karang Mas restaurant was on Jalan Siliwangi, the main shopping street in Kupang, not far from the bemo terminal in the main square. It was built on rocks on the beach and the tide came up around three sides of it. Like everything else in Kupang, it was crumbling - tropical style. The roof leaked, the walls were discoloured from damp, the decor looked like it was done in the sixties and the round formica tables were really ricketty. But it was comfortable. It was a great place to sit and have a beer or a meal and look out over the ocean. There was plenty of air and the crashing of the waves on the rocks below had a calming effect on your soul.
From the windows on one side you could look out over the town beach. It wasn't very long and it was permanently covered in rubbish washed up from the ocean. Really covered, i mean - so much so that it looked like a garbage dump. In some weird way it reminded me of Sydney's Bondi Beach!
When we got back to town from Bolok, we went into the Karang Mas for some food and a drop of beer. In there, we met a canadian woman and man who were involved in some indonesian-canadian cultural exchange. They were sort of team leaders and they were sitting there working out their accounts.
We asked them if they knew anywhere good to stay, as we didn't want to go back to the last place, and they pointed us towards the Sea Breeze Homestay, which was only a couple of hundred yards away from the Karang Mas, at the end of the garbage dump beach.
The Sea Breeze was another crumbling old Kupang building, with a leaking roof and the rusty reinforcing steel visible in the concrete it was built from. It was on the bank of the river, right where it joined the sea and the back wall of the building was actually continuous with the river embankment. The toilets just went directly through this wall into the river. We had a room upstairs, with walls like cardboard, so you could lie in bed and listen to the person breathing in bed next to you - on the other side of the wall. However, it was a really nice place and we felt much more comfortable there than the last one. Gama and Abdul who ran the place were really cool. They had two kids, a five year old boy who was a little monster and a three year old girl who was cool.
Being vegan in Kupang was virtually impossible, unless you wanted to just live on boiled rice or you could cook your own food. We decided we'd get a billy and a spirit burner and do our own cooking. The market had a small, but reasonable range of fresh stuff, including tofu and tempeh. And if we cooked it ourselves it would be quite easy. As it was, by the time we left Kupang, because it had taken all that time to work out that hardly anything was actually vegan, we were beginning to get a bit sick.
Timor was such a poor island that the range of food available was very limited and i guessed they chucked everything in. They'd certainly have no concept of veganism and very little idea of vegetarianism, if any. But that, of course, is nothing unusual anywhere in the world! But because our grasp of indonesian was worse than basic at that point, we had very little hope of getting food that was really vegan.