When we left Australia, we were up before dawn to head for the airport at 4:00 am in order to catch one of the twice per week flight combinations that would take us from Perth to Darwin, then connecting on to Dili, capital of Timor-Leste all in one day. Timor-Leste is a very mountainous country, as we saw flying in. Visa on arrival was easy, but somewhat slow since Dili’s airport is tiny and there’s not a lot of staff to process the few tourists arriving. By the time that we got to downtown Dili it was late afternoon, but we’d been on the go for nearly 12 hours so only had time for one top priority task; finding the port for boats to Atauro Island!
The government ferries didn’t run the next day, and we had been emailing for days to book a spot with one of the diving resorts’ boats without success, so our only hope was a local boat. Found the “port” which was simply a stretch of empty beach being guarded by the maritime police, but there was no such thing as a ticket office. We were just told to come back the next morning to ask around. So we just walked around the local market, then returned to our hotel, the Sunset Inn whose on-site restaurant is the Pro EMA Restaurant-School, for an excellent dinner.
Another early morning the next day, as we had a quick breakfast and walked over to the port which was a hub of activity at 8:00 am. We quickly spotted a small boat anchored a few metres off the beach that seemed to be taking passengers, and indeed when some random guy on the shore shouted at them a crew member waded ashore and grabbed our bags to be lashed on the top deck. And then we waited…. A guy with passable English told us that the captain was waiting for the waves to settle down, but since the sea was dead calm we suspect that they just wanted to load every last passenger that they could find!
Finally, after 30 minutes or so, we we given the OK to wade out into the knee-deep water and climb aboard. We grabbed a spot in the cabin, which was a low space with just over a metre of headroom. Almost 30 of us were packed in there, in a space about 2 metres wide and 8 or 10 metres long. Those were the good seats! Even more people (and a few chickens) were on the top deck amongst the luggage and market goods lashed up there. We had cleverly grabbed spots by an open window and oddly there was a free spot left right beside the window. We had no idea why that space was there until a crew member climbed into the boat through the open porthole and got to work. See the 11-second video:
When he started bailing we nearly bailed out too! But nobody else seemed too concerned, and we really wanted to see Atauro Island, so we hung in there and set sail within a few minutes. We have no idea what the view was like as we took a couple of hours to cross the ~25 kilometres over to Atauro. Not much of a view out the open windows/portholes that were only 30-40cm above the waterline, and at one point the windward window had to be closed as the waves slopped in a bit. (The lee window stayed open so that the bailer could continue to scoop water out of the bilge and fling it out the window every 5 or 10 minutes!) And so we finally got to Atauro…. almost.
Although we were only 20 metres or so from the beach, we had to clear a reef and spent 45 minutes bobbing around waiting for the tide to come in enough so that we wouldn’t scrape (too much). Our crew member in the cabin with us abandoned his bailing to jump into the water and moved some rocks around to accelerate the process and we finally landed. Bags, bundles of stuff for the market, and the chickens were all loaded into waiting tuk-tuks and we finished the last 6-8km by dirt road.
Our home for a day on Atauro was Barry’s Place, an eco-lodge that truly lives up to its name. With solar-powered thatch huts stretching along hundreds of metres of swimming beach, it was pretty easy to disconnect (due to limited cell coverage) and only stop swimming or generally lazing around long enough for meals of fresh caught tuna and local produce.
The next morning, we did get a little bit active and went snorkelling at the reef just a 3-minute boat ride offshore. The reef coral is in excellent shape but it is the reef fish that are truly outstanding. The reefs of Atauro Island have been called the most species diverse on the planet by Conservation International in a 2016 report. Pictures of just a few of the hundreds of fish species to be seen are in the photo gallery and YouTube video below.
Due to ferry schedules, we had to leave after only a day on this tropical island paradise, with just enough time to stroll through the Saturday market before our departure. Thankfully, the government ferry that runs on market days is a huge and relatively comfortable. And we could even see out the windows to watch the dolphins leaping beside us as we sailed back to Dili.
Dili is covered in the next post, but check out our pictures from Atauro Island first! High res images on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720312273430
