Diary, Day Seven: Your Choice - Malaria Or Dengue Fever
First of all I want to share with you the splendours of my accommodation. The ABC travel service, used to operating on a miniscule budget, have excelled themselves. I have been allocated a monks cell in a motel here in Viqueque. The hand-basin appears to have been recently ripped off the wall and the pipes protrude from the broken plaster. But even if they were to install a new hand-basin, to bring my accommodation up to the standards of my travel companions, there would not be a dribble of water. The shower head remains in situ but refuses to proffer a drop. There is a fan of sorts, but the plug is too broken to attach to a power point. But the bed! The bed is magnificent! Not quite one metre wide, it has the sort of mattress that would induce piety in a libertine. But there is wonderful room service. Your choice of malaria or dengue fever. In fact you don’t even have to order - the mosquitoes are thundering around the room now, as big as fruit bats.
At any moment the dry season will end with a few claps of thunder and the downpour will transform East Timor from dust and gravel to tropical excess. And our only hope is that it holds off for another couple of days as it would render our further plans to explore the place redundant. We’re just making it at the moment, our trusty 4WD enduring more mechanical insults from the wrecked roads than bare thinking about. If there were mechanical rights like human rights we would be guilty as charged for making it suffer such long and agonising days. But it’s all worth it – every encounter we have had has been extraordinary.
This morning began with further details on the Australian army’s activities in Same and this afternoon we visited an impossibly beautiful village in the ‘Valley of the Widows’, were we learnt of a vast massacre carried out on these people by the Indonesian forces. There’s a glimpse of our encounter on the website.
Phillip Adams