Who are you Timor Leste?

I have now been in Timor for 5 days, it's not my first time (I came for a mountain bike race in 2011) but it is the first time I have been here and left to my own devices. I am staying in suburban Dilli if that's what you can call it. The NGO house is nestled among tin shacks next to a flood water canal. The best thing I did was bring my bike because I am pretty sure that I would be going mad without it. Everything is so expensive here (compared to Cambodia) and there is no way I would handle waiting for the university driver to get me somewhere, I resent spending a fortune on Taxis and I'm pretty sure I'd end up on the wrong bus if I tried that.

Timor is a place that has long been in my consciousness since just a few months before I joined the army and Lennard Manning gave his life here. Following that, I watched a lot of my friends deploy here and all in the space of a decade it has gone from war zone to community development zone. I've always thought that you can tell a lot about a country by the traffic and moving around Dilli is just a little bit more aggressive than I remembered. There is some of the lawlessness of the east but with the speed and new cars of the west. There are motos but they are more powerful to get up those hills. I think that the identity of traffic in Timor Leste is being carved out in its multicoloured buses which vary from rasta type colours to bright pink with suggestive images of women to hard core football team colours. The horns range from deafening  truck horns that beep right when they are beside me to see if I will jump, to Nepal-style echoing horns that remind me of 14 hour bus rides, to the bus that came up behind me on my evening ride tonight that fair-dinkum sounded like a cow! 

I can't quite decide who (which country) Timor reminds me of the most. When I ride around surburban Dilli a type of electronica-Latino music is often blaring. There is a distinct feeling of South America, but when I look at the kids swimming naked on the beach launching themselves off boulders then I am reminded of Tonga... I don't really feel like I am in South East Asia until I go to the university and see how poorly equipped it is and the low level of knowledge in the students. I'm sure that Timor is very different to to what it was, even different to 3 years ago when I came. Timor is developing its own unique personality and I look forward to watching it grow up.