TINY TROPICAL TIMOR Island with a split personality You probably couldn’t pick a more oddball vacation destination than East Timor, officially “Timor Leste,” in the national language, Portuguese. An independent country that shares the small tropical island of Timor, with Indonesia. East Timor is a charming little hodgepodge. The currency is the good old American greenback, the U.S. dollar. Portuguese is one of two official languages, but only a small-fraction of the people speak the vowel laden Romance language. All of Timor, like surrounding Indonesia is multi-lingual. Most people speak several of the 32 indigenous languages. One at home, perhaps another at worship, another at school, and yet another for business purposes. Indonesian, which serves as a second language across much of neighboring Indonesia, also serves the same purpose on Timor, which was part of Indonesia from 1975, until a violent divorce in 1999. However, there is a more substantial and enduring heritage than a largely unspoken language remaining from almost a half millennium as a Portuguese colony, East Timor is one of only two entirely Roman Catholic countries in Asia, the other being the more familiar Philippines sixteen hundred miles to the northwest. Catholicism hardly made a dent in predominantly Buddhist Macau, or Hindu Portuguese India, but Timor took the cross to heart in the least likely, most remote and totally ignored corner of the formerly worldwide Portuguese Empire. Ironically, it was Timor’s brief but brutal quarter century under Indonesian occupation that spurred baptisms more than four hundred years of Portuguese missionary zeal ever could. Jakarta forced the captive population to choose between Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, or the Protestant faith. Animism and tribal beliefs were considered incompatible with assimilation, so they were not an option. Timorese overwhelmingly embraced the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity as a counter balance against the prevailing minarets of Indonesia. Catholicism for the Timorese became synonymous with freedom, independence, nationalism and cultural cohesion. But it’s the Portuguese legacy that provides the finest examples of European architecture on the island, the massive colonial churches that now attract more devout parishioners than Lisbon could ever entice into their exquisite Baroque portals. CORAL TRIANGLE Timor’s most valuable natural asset is it’s location within the Coral Triangle, the underwater equivalent of the Amazon Rain Forest, which stretches from Borneo on the west, to the Solomon Islands on the east, the Philippines on the north, and Timor on the south. Although we think of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the southeast as the greatest coral environment on earth, The Coral Triangle with 76% of all known coral species, at least six hundred species and counting as new species are discovered almost daily, actually surpasses that Aussie reef as the richest marine environment on the planet, home to mantees, five species of sea turtles, a dozen species of whales, twenty-two species of dolphins, and thousands of species of deep sea and reef fish. The Coral Triangle may be so biologically rich because of its location, halved by the equator and at the western edge of the Pacific, the world’s largest ocean, overlapping the marine life of the adjacent calmer Indian Ocean, third largest body of water, and the world’s warmest ocean. At this point these two vast oceans have a broad confluence, unlike other bodies of water such as the Mediterranean Sea, which is almost wholly surrounded by land with only a narrow opening to the Atlantic choking off marine enrichment. Nino Santana National Park on the eastern tip of Timor protects part of the Coral Triangle, as well as terrestrial habitats home to the one horned rhinoceros, and the impressive Yellow crested Cockatoo, the gorgeous Green Pigeon that you could easily mistake for a parrot because of its brilliant lime green plumage, and dozens more unique species of avian life. Catholic Timor and neighboring Flores Islands along with Hindu Bali, form part of the Lesser Sunda Islands, also called the Southeast Islands, or Tenggara, and constitute a non-Moslem pocket surrounded by predominantly Islamic populations. Timor was the imperial dumping ground, where political and cultural exiles from Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Sao Tome e Principe, Goa and Portuguese Guinea were banished. So you will find influences from those distant places in the local cuisine, culture and genetic make up. A large part of Timor’s charm is its mixed, or mestizo population. The Dutch called the native people Black Portuguese, the Portuguese called them Topasses. Timorese regard themselves as members of several tribes of Malayo-Polynesian, and Melanesian-Papuan ancestry. Resistance to absorption by Indonesia finally unified the many tribes into one resilient nationality. Timorese cuisine is heavily based on corn, the only Asian/Pacific Islander cuisine based on maize, plus local fish, seafood, chicken, pork, chorizo sausage, fresh picked coconuts, and bananas as well as root crops. Tapai is a slightly fermented rice meal paste cutely wrapped in a fresh green banana leaf, much like the more familiar Mexican tamale, popular across Timor, and Indonesia. Coffee connoisseurs might want to sample the delicious homegrown Arabica varieties of East Timor, which are internationally certified as organic and chemical free. You could enjoy your coffee with bibika, a grilled, layered coconut cake baked in banana leaves. Of course, don’t expect glitzy casinos, bright lights, or a wild nightlife on Timor. Come to Timor for lonely beaches fringed by coconut palm trees, some of the best diving and hiking in Southeast Asia, for a small town atmosphere even in the capital and largest city of Dili, for a change of pace, to experience the best example of an almost wholly Eurasian fusion society and a nascent country still in formation, in transition to it’s ultimate incarnation. The very definition of a developing nation. You could easily combine your visit to Timor with a short stopover on Kimodo Island, famed for the largest lizards in the world, and Timor’s sister island, Flores. Flores is Indonesia’s only predominantly Catholic island, and due to the same pattern of Portuguese colonization centuries ago that ended on Flores in the 1850s, but survived in East Timor until our lifetimes. You can visit Timor on a day trip from Darwin, Australia, which is 446 miles directly south of Timor across the Timor Sea, which is itself sandwiched between Australia’s Northern Territory on the south, and Timor to the north.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:49:37 +0000
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