Timor Sea Nautical Services

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Travel and Dive in Timor Leste

Most people know very little about Timor Leste, maybe only the name and some vague memory that a few years ago the media had East Timor in the agenda for a short time because something big and not very pleasant was going on there.

Timor slipped off the headlines of the newspapers but went on in its own difficult struggle for freedom and development, and after 5 years, not all of them easy, Timor Leste is there, slowly growing, slowly trying to find its way.

Timor Leste is not rich and is not “developed” yet. Has very little to offer to the tourist that would like an easy and relaxing holiday with good infrastructures and a lot of services tailored for the traveller. Timor Leste has still a basic economy more based on personal consumption of self produced goods and very, very little businesses, rather than on an extensive net of commerce.

But Timor has some things to offer that not many other countries can offer in the same way. Timor is a real place with real difficulties, real people and real problems to overcome. And has some of the more surprising diving in the world in a completely pristine sea.

Timor is not a trip for everybody: it is a trip for an adventurer traveller that knows what he/she is doing, that is ready to accept unforseen difficulties and problems, and that is very adaptable.

You can stay for a while in Dili, the capital city. Here few hotels can offer you a reasonable standard of accommodation (expensive) and there is a choice of small restaurants (cheap), but it is where you are more likely to experience some form of social and political tension that is still lingering in the country. And then you can leave on a four wheel drive and travel to the centre of the island, to Maubisse and Mount Ramelau where the Timorese army was resisting the Indonesian invaders and where you can find animistic places of worships scattered in the wood. Or you can go to the extreme east of the country o the little beautiful Jako island, cross the narrow channel with a local fisherman and roast your fish on an improvised fireplace. Or again get a picturesque ferry and go to Oecussi, where the Portuguese first landed in 1540. It is a small Timorese enclave surrounded by Indonesian land, and still regularly raided by the illegal militia, where half of the buildings are destroyed and you feel the pain of human life. Everywhere in the country are scattered the imposing remnants of a more than four centuries long Portuguese rule: old forts on the seaside with crumbling walls of white stone, heavy cannons with no more purpose left behind, posadas that must have been happy for their Portuguese guests in other times. And this too add some ghostly magic to the place.

And then, of course, you can go diving. You can leave from the small city of Com or from Dili (the only two places where you can find a fill for your tanks). Diving in East Timor can’t be a disappointing experience. It is simple like that. Just under the water there is a paradise untouched by the poverty, the troubles, the war, the rubbish carelessly left on some of the otherwise beautiful beaches.

Diving in Timor suits a skilled and responsible diver with excellent buoyancy control and a good dose of common sense. Even a shore dive can potentially go down to a depth of hundreds of meters and there are no decompression chambers around. The closest one is in Darwin, in Australia. So you do not want to have any problem.

If you think you would like to try, call us. We have the knowledge to take you there, to guide you through the country, to contact the local people and to come diving with you.

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A Bit of History (just a bit, don’t worry)

Timor Leste has always been a far away place. From the 16^th Century it was at the extreme east of the Portuguese empire. A small colony, not that rich and not that important. Hard wood, spices and coffee have always been their main assets. Further East only desolated lands, wild people, head hunters and the open and empty space of the Pacific Ocean.

Timor is an island just north of Australia; half of it has been a Portuguese colony for centuries but became independent after the Carnation revolution that brought democracy in Portugal in 1975. But the tiny dimension of the state and the fact that Timor had still a very unstable political organization, made Indonesian rulers think that it could have been easy to annex East Timor and to make another province of their state with it. In the cold war era the Western world stood apart, not really interested (or maybe yes…). Indonesia was an anticommunist nation, and that was good enough for them.

But Timorese people did not fit well in the variegated but Muslim dominated Indonesia and they started a long fight for freedom conducted by many people and a leading class that was mainly in exile.

Times changes and after almost 30 years history was at a bend. In a changed international panorama, to be anticommunist was not enough to justify an invasion (and maybe to be a Muslim state became a disadvantage in Western eyes) and Timor Leste fighters for freedom got back some of the support that they did not have at the beginning of their struggle.

After a lot of pain and of destruction Timor Leste became independent again from Indonesian rule after 27 years of hard fight for freedom in 2002.