After a week of non-stop head-on full force activity with little time to break, i had great plans for the weekend. My plans were to do as little as possible. But Timor Leste had a different plan in store.

Saturday morning, i was woken up by the room service who wanted to come and clean my place at an unheartly nine o’clock. I dragged myself to the door and must have looked scary enough so they let me rest for another hour.

After a breakfast at eleven, i took the course north-west towards Castaway, the bar upstairs to Dive Timor. It was a one or two hour walk in the heat and a Melbourne Bitter has never tasted so good.

A hour of slacking later, and much to my surprise, my project manager arrives. He’s waiting for some diving equipment to be ready downstairs, and for somebody else to arrive, and would i perhaps be interested in joining them? Well, why the heck not. I was warm and sweaty and i hadn’t even been in the sea once during my trip so far! Likewise a surprise, the person my PM was waiting for was another fella from his office, one who i’ve been talking with a bit, so we were all like old friends. Kind of. Not having a license (or even training) to dive, i would snorkel along while they would take a deeper dip.

After a detour to my hotel to grab some gear, and a very nice stopover at my PM’s house, the group of now five divers and i headed for the beach.

Timor Leste is beautiful from the beach. All the harshness of Dili is like sweapt away. The mountains and the sea is just … just so wonderful. I could really live here, for maybe six months or so :). Farther away, over the bay, rain clouds gathered over Dili’s more western regions. As tropical rain clouds do, these too looked pretty impressive. And say, doesn’t it look like it’s raining over Dili. I’m glad we’re here and not there.

We could see the rain and hear the thunder. We would see flashes above the mountains, and then, the rain. First just a little sprinkle, but this soon turned into a Proper rain. It was decided to abort the dive for today and try again tomorrow. Not because you get wet in the rain, but rather as a security precaution with the lightning, and because the rain messes up the sea so that you really can’t see much under the water anyway.

But a Tropical Rain is not to be confused with the European, more civilized variants that i have been brought up with. The Proper rain very soon decided to show what true Tropical Rain is made of. Water. Lots of water.

Like a three dimensional wall of a hundred thousand heavenly showers set on maximum overdrive, the water surrounded me. It was like being in a solid body of rain. Rain on me! i loudly exclaimed to the forces of weather, with arms stretched out and face lifted towards the sky. I was extatic, running around, shouting, jumping in the giant waves of a warm sea. East Timor welcomed me. I was no longer afraid of this place.

After this apparently silly behaviour, which must have raised an eyebrow or two, the rain eased and we decided it was time to go home. Except that there were now trees and big branches over the road, between the jeeps. Not on the jeeps, which was lucky, and not so big that two or three sturdy men couldn’t move them. We pushed and pulled and yanked and so cleared the road of nature’s more floral obstacles and drove the jeeps over what used to be a parking lot but now had become a small sea.

The jeeps didn’t get stuck and all was fine, until a few hundred meters down the road, where two big trees completely blocked the road. We were stuck. Stuck, wet, and watched by a whole lot of locals, who had somehow magically appeared to watch us. We were the entertainment.

Well, it was no panic and no reason for it either. Operations were called and the fire brigade sent for. And while we waited for the cavallery to arrive, chatting with some tourists, somebody from a neighbouring house had fetched a hefty wire cutting thingamajing (thingamatång, in swedish) and carved through the barbed wire. Again, a jeep was one of the few types of transportation that would make it through the lake that used to be a front yard. A gnu or a canoe (canú would also have worked, but of those we had none.

Well, we made it home, obviously, and we got diving/snorkelling on sunday, so all is well that ends. And while my planned phone call home i got rained off saturday, i got to call my girls on sunday, which was the very height of the weekend. I am at home. You are in East Timor. East Timor is far away. It’s on the map. Near Australia. It must be dark there (!). It’s snowing. I’m playing animal dominoes. There are red letters, A, L, N… on the box.

Ronja even sang me a song. She is just so cute.

By the way, there are new pictures out, from the Bali leg of my tour.