To market, to market to buy a fat pig

The butcher, the fisho and the betel nut seller.

I just love visiting Asian markets. They are so alive with the daily business of life. Travelling with local guides, Willie and Wenton , means we can have the unusual explained to us. Our first visit is to NekiNeki, ½ hour from Soe. It’s crowded with locals and we create much amusement and calls of Mrs! Mrs!


(Eleri & Willie our West Timorese guide who is married to an Australian.)

Meat is freshly slaughtered and they definitely take the “Nose to Tail”, use all parts of the beast trend very seriously. I think, maybe, they invented it. Coils of intestine, cow head, the snout and hearts it’s all here for the buying.

(Butcher's stall NekiNeki)

Flat fried discs the size of your palm overflow from large bags 3 feet high, it’s NekiNeki version of a doughnut. Betel nut and accompaniments seem to be the main thing being traded along with chickens, dried fish and chilli. I buy a bright yellow and pink crocheted doily. The women said it was “haark”, the Dutch word for hook as in crochet hook. In comparison to the other textiles people buy this is probably the ugliest thing in the market but as I also crochet so I just fell in love with it. The other tour members view my purchase with raised eyebrows.


(Man with chickens, not sure whether he was buying or selling but he was very happy.)

Our next market visit is the thriving Maubesi market (30 min from Kefamenau). Set along the banks of the river, this large sprawling noisy market is overflowing with fish, taro, and fresh meat. The live meat market is down at the riverside, goats, pigs, fowl and the odd dog are all being sold at a brisk pace.

A woman is selling small pancakes cooked to order over a tiny smoking fire. Willie explains they are made from the inside of a particular palm tree, the dry pulp is grated and then added to coconut. The flavour is nutty, a little sweet and smoky. They are delicious or enak. The woman has tattoos on the backs of her hands and shins, her hair is styled up in a bun and her teeth are painted black. Willie says this is because she is from a village south of her and this is their tradition. The teeth blackening comes from the liquid of a plant also used for dyeing, it’s heated and then painted on daily.


(Woman cooking at Maubesi market.)

Our final Timor market is Oeba, in downtown Kupung which is by the sea so the fish stalls are overflowing with fresh parrot fish, tuna, squid and a whole lot of other unidentifiable sea life-forms.
Fresh tofu, fresh tempeh, spices and traditional medicines are for sale. Wenton buys fruit for our picnic lunch and we taste palm sugar which has been dried into small round discs encircled with thin strips of lontar palm

We have caused much laughter, I find my expressions of delight are quickly mimicked by the stall holders which ensures even more laughter. Our etiquette is that we ask permission for a photo and then show them the photo. Now there is even more laughing and friends are called over to view it.

My lasting memory is of the beautiful display of all the produce which is always carefully grouped in neat rows with a great attention to colour and composition. I’ll also remember the smells.

(Betel nut artfully displayed.)

Betel nut - the new lipstick

We tried betel nut! It's typically handed out as a welcome when you go to a meeting or negotiation of some sort. We've been giving betel nut in some places as a present when we arrive.

The village of Benlutu is in Amanuban between Soe and Kupang. They are expecting us when we arrive and we are greeted by a sung welcome. When we are seated in the shade, a young woman offers us betel nut from a woven basket (we now both own one of these baskets but without the betel nut).

How to chew a betel nut
You take a piece of betel nut and another piece of the plant that is green, cylindrical and not very big. Pop the nut in your mouth and plant it in your cheek for now. Wait for the lime to come around in a little container. The lime isn't anything to do with green citrus, it's like garden lime. Put a small bit of lime on the palm of your left hand. Dip the bit that's not in your mouth into the lime. Then suck the lime off.

Start chewing the betel nut and the lime. Immediately it creates lots of saliva that you musn't swallow and your tongue goes a bit numb. When the saliva gets too much spit it out on the ground and you will discover the whole thing has gone very red. I didn't put enough lime on mine I think and I just got the tongue numbing experience. Fiona's teeth and lips went an attractive shade of red but we didn't get a picture of this unfortunately.

People who chew betel nut alot have very red teeth and are forever spitting on the ground, great red projectiles. However it did clear up a small mystery - I thought there had been fighting in some places, like you see outside pubs in Sydney and where a blood trail is left on the ground. Betel nut is the real answer.

The weaving in this village was warp wrapped, an incredibly labor intensive process but with beautiful results. They are firmly wedded to synthetic dyes here but are using some natural dyes as well.

The villagers love William as he is well over 6 foot tall and they are all tiny. They delighted in dressing him up in traditional cloth and having their photo taken with him for the record of foreigners who have visited the village. It's a nice pay back for all the photos we take.

We meet a Raja and end up in a steakhouse

We meet the Raja of Amarasi, Robert Koroh, in his private home in Baun, not far from Kupang. He is the 20th Raja but as he says only 19 of them were Kings and had a kingdom. He now just has a ceremonial role. In fact, we meet him in his home because if we met in the palace, they would have had to organise a large ceremony and nobody wanted that.

He looks alot like Xanana Gusmao and has a charismatic and clearly educated outlook on the world, even through interpretation. We hear about the history of Amarasi and Indonesia.

West Timor was divided into kingdoms, originally strongly supported by the Dutch in a classic colonial approach. However, when the proposal to create an independent Indonesia was put to the vote just after World War II, West Timor joined up and the kingdoms were ended. The kingdoms, however, weren’t that interested in joining up, they just wanted to be independent kingdoms but that didn’t appear to be a realistic option.

The village of Baun is located high on a mountain about an hour outside Kupang. It is a bit like going to a secluded rainforest retreat a bit like Maleny – somewhere you would go to get away from it all for the weekend. The little houses are tucked away in the rainforest and it just has the best feel about it. Fiona reckons she will live there part of the year and the rest she will become a seaweed farmer down near the harbour. I warned her about covering up well and not getting sun damage but I don’t think that was her major concern.

After our visit ends and we buy some textiles we walked a short way up the road to visit a new women’s co-operative that has been set up. The head weaver shows us the results of their experimentation with a new dyeing approach and the red colour they have achieved is amazingly deep and lush. Everyone agrees it is a great success.
The women have set up a credit union with training and support provided through Threads of Life and are very proud of their books and bring them out to show us. We saw the same in Looneke. As a banker myself this is great to see!

Fiona bought a new sash that she can use as a belt. It’s perfectly matched to her “colours”. I has a larger piece with an Amarasi “sleeping snakes” design. And we take our photos with the weavers of our pieces. Where we have been able, we have taken our photos of the weavers, with their pieces. This has the practical benefit of providing provenance but really it amuses everyone so much and generates gales of laughter every time, especially when you show the picture you have just taken. Everyone is delighted. Must try this in Australia!

Unbelievably, we have dinner at a restaurant called “Rotterdam Steakhouse”. It is super kitsch, with cheesy “dancing cheek to cheek” music, outdoors and right by the sea. Surprisingly everyone is pretty happy with what they have to eat. I have the vegetarian special - rice, tempeh and tofu. I spy a fantastic dessert on the menu but, like all the other fantastic desserts on the menu, it is actually off the menu. We all have icecream instead.

The things you take for granted ...

Kupang is the only place in West Timor where we have had internet access or, for that matter, mobile coverage.

But the Hotel Kristal - "Kupang's best hotel" has wireless! But it's wireless that let's us publish text to the blog but not pictures. And we can't even see the blog so if you can see this, our workaround is working! My limited diagnosis of this problem is that we have IPv4 connectivity but not IPv6 I'm guessing this is an infrastructure problem. The fact that we have wireless at all is pretty remarkable.

We'll be back in Bali tonight and hopefully we can get the pictures up. We are madly writing up the last few days but it has been HUGE and hard to convey. I was worried before I left that the pace would be too slow and I would get bored. That's not happening!

In search of the Morinda dye.

Kupung, West Timor.
We are in search of particular red dye, a dye which comes from the roots of the morinda tree and produces very earthy ochreish red hues. Threads of Life have been working with this community for six years. The co-op is lead by a master weaver, Mama Rosa, a woman who has kept alive the knowledge of natural dyeing.

We flew to Kupang, drove two hours up a range to Kefanenanu where a roaring wind brings a cool change. This gives us a head start as there is another four hours of driving ahead of us tomorrow.

The long drive to Looneke takes us through a constantly changing environment from lush forest to dry open bush. The road progressively worsens until we are on a bush track made slippery and boggy with unseasonal rain.

Our small convoy stops before the village and we are greeted by the nephew in-law of Mama Rosa, this is a matrilineal society with the men coming into the woman’s household.

Franz walks us the 800 metres into the village, children run ahead, yelling out our arrival. We pass small village homes with pigs and chickens roaming freely. Surrounding us is a ‘food forest’: candlenut, betel nut, wild breadfruit and natural trellises of wild pepper.

The co-op and the head clansman greet us with a welcome song,with women drumming and Jean cuts a piece of morinda dyed thread which is strung across the entrance way.

People’s excitement at having us here is obvious as we are the first group of interested tourists to really visit like this and we can't help but share their pleasure.

Lunch is followed by a fascinating weaving and dyeing demonstration which is held in the dwelling built from the co-ops first profit. And it’s here we get to see the first evidence of the red dye of morinda. We see the dye being made, the thread woven and on a tour of the forest we see the morindah tree growing.

The sale of these beautiful textiles is a great success, the earthiness, the many shades of reds and browns and intricate motifs makes it hard for us to resist.

But we can’t leave without another song and dance. And before I know it Eleri is being dressed in her newly purchased sarong and is wiggling those hips in perfect time to the drums as we walk up the hill.

Great laughter is the last thing we hear as we make our way away from Mama Rosa, the Putri Tunggal Co-op and the village of Looneke.

West Timor - Soe

We arrived in Kupang, West Timor to a very gusty and windy day. It’s nowhere near as lush and humid as Bali and it felt like a completely different place. In fact, it is remarkably similar to some parts of northern Australia. It’s the dry season, but there had been unusual amounts of rain and our intended destination had, in fact, been washed out.

I’ve never travelled with a group of 20 before and it took longer than usual to get out of the airport, locate our cars and drivers before heading off to lunch in Kupang at a “seaside restaurant” where we eat some interesting and never seen foods before. Fiona was brave enough to try the avocado, condensed milk and chocolate drink. I was attracted to the condensed milk but put off by the thought of avocado drink. As it turned out it was a good choice. I had a more standard coconut drink.

After lunch we set off for the town of Soe in the highlands. We had been warned to bring our jumpers as Soe is cold. On the way we passed the lowland rice farms and saw the refugee camps that housed refugees from East Timor post independence. It appears they didn’t integrate into West Timor as well as they might have. West Timor has a history of waves of immigration from other places back hundreds of years at least. We are told that many of the East Timorese went back or dispersed, certainly the refugee camps appeared to be empty.

Soe was cold! And there was a stiff wind. Here’s a picture of us huddled around having a drink before dinner, all wearing our entire travelling wardrobe (we just took a subset of our Bali clothes and left the rest behind).


The Bahagia 2 Hotel was extraordinary. Bahagia means “happy”. We asked what Bahagia 1 was like and was told “not very happy at all.”



To get a picture of the Bahagia 2 imagine a wild west theme complete with statue of cowboy mounted on his rearing horse combined with the best of Asian karaoke bar complete with a wall mounted lobster and you’ve got the picture. Not gelling for you? Here’s the evidence below.


Jean from Threads of Life and Fiona deep in conversation, not even noticing the giant lobster behind them.



I could have taken these chairs home.

Dinner and then breakfast the next morning was basic – no fancy drinks up here! Although someone did manage to find a number of bottles of Guinness. Go figure.

We had been told that West Timor was very poor, so I was surprised to see that the houses seemed relatively solid and well built. Some extraordinary looking houses here! Often painted in wild colours. And churches everywhere. This is protestant area and it’s clear that their Christianity is active. Apparently Islam is unlikely to take much of a hold here because everyone likes eating pig so much. A pictorial post on houses will come soon – I’m amassing the material.

Batik

We have a bit more time than expected this morning before we leave Bali so a few minutes to update you all on yesterday's trip to a batik studio that uses natural dyes and does some really top class batik. Of course that means we have more acquisitions to show off when we get home.

The owner of the batik studio was one of the founders of the YPBB Foundation - the part of Threads of Life that supports the research, development and support for natural dyes including growing the plants. He uses alot of indigo in his work.

We saw all stages of production.


Here's a picture of the stamps they use in some designs. These are dipped in hot wax and applied to the clean material.


And then there is the dying process. They make their own dyes. Here is a picture of indigo being made - part of the dye making process is getting the oxygen into the mix. This guy is aerating the mixture. The dying and pattern design is a bloke's job it appears.



Women get to do all the fine, detailed work and here are two pictures of women painting with wax onto the cloth. This cloth has already been dyed at least once and in each layer, there is added wax to block out more and to create variations of depth of colour, and sometimes mixing in red/brown colours.


And Fiona went to a pig restaurant for lunch. I didn't. I found a hippy cafe. That choice of lunches says everything. She also found the Ubud Writers Festival and I came back to organise my photos.