Misadventures on the way to Timor-Leste
After 30 days in Indonesia (time flies!), our visas were up so we had to leave the country to restart the clock. Why not spend a week in Timor-Leste! Timor-Leste—aka East Timor—shares the island of Timor with Indonesia, so getting there meant a flight to Kupang (Indonesian side) and a trip overland to Timor-Leste’s capitol of Dili. Sounds simple enough…
When we arrived in Kupang yesterday afternoon [I wrote this post halfway through the day two weeks ago and decided to keep it in the present tense] I was feeling good about things. Our hotel hosts said they would book the tourist bus for us, leaving at 8 am, no problem! When we did not hear any follow-up confirmation from them we got a little worried, but a return visit to the front desk and conversation via Google Translate reassured us that everything was fine and someone would pick us up in the morning.
And to be fair, someone did come to pick us up in the morning. We got in the car, and things immediately got confusing.
Him: Ok where you go?
Us: Umm don’t you know? Aren’t you taking us to the bus?
Him: What bus?
Us: The bus to Dili? We’re supposed to go to Dili today!
Him: I can’t drive you to Dili!
Us: No no we’re supposed to have bus tickets reserved?!?
Him: The hotel just say you want me to drive you today! You want me to drive you to Dili???
What exactly went wrong here is a mystery that will never be solved. Did the hotel even call the bus company? Or did they just pass a driving job off to a friend? Maybe they couldn’t get ahold of the bus company so they arranged an alternative option without consulting us? Maybe they thought we wanted to leave at 8 (a time we agreed to because that’s when they said the bus leaves), and the bus actually leaves earlier so rather than tell us a new time they just called us a car (correcting people is a big no-no in this save-face culture)? We’ll never know.
And stakes are high for this one. Our Indonesian visas expire at midnight tonight so we have to leave the country, or face a big fine and potentially be barred from reentry. And we don’t have Timor-Leste visas yet because the bus was supposed to stop somewhere to do that paperwork on the way.
So this driver—who has now been unwittingly enlisted into our chaos day—made some calls and drove us to the bus company office. The bus already left. New plan: catch it at the next stop! We drove at terrifying speeds on incredibly windy narrow mountain roads, zooming past motorbikes and trucks and other cars with just a quick beep-beep as warning, blasting American 90s country the whole way (I don’t hate it). Four hours later we arrived in the town of Atambua (still on the Indonesian side), 30 minutes after the bus already left. You know that stomach-sinking feeling? Fuuuuuuck.
I use an excessive amount of brain space scenario planning — thinking through all possible futures to pick the best one, anticipating any and all things that could go wrong, mentally ranking them based on some function of probability times potential consequences, and then taking steps to prepare. This fun little quirk has served me well; my pre-travel job was literally scenario-mapping worst-case outcomes (i.e., genocide), and as we travel and deal with a lot of planning, it’s no coincidence that logistics have gone smoothly (The downside is that I can’t turn it off and rarely sleep well, but that’s a different story for a different day!).
However, as much as I do to avoid chaos days, once everything goes to shit I’m shockingly ok with it.
So now our driver is taking us all the way to the land border at Mota’ain, where he insists we can get a visa, despite my emails with the US consulate in Dili and the Timor-Leste government website saying that visas upon arrival at land borders are not a thing right now. I’ve been anticipating this disaster for weeks, since we had a really hard time finding any information on the bus and the borders. But now that it’s happening, I’m just on this journey. Like reading a mystery, I’m curiously awaiting the ending. Will we get there and be turned back to Atambua? Possibly! Will we bribe someone at the land border for a visa? Maybe! Will this whole experience be much more expensive and stressful than it would have been if only our hotel had booked the damn bus like they said they did? Yes.
Only time will tell…