Last weekend I took a short trip out of Dili to the neighbouring district, Liquica, for an overnight beachside holiday with some friends.
There’s a beautiful, swanky beachside restaurant called Black Rock in Liquica that sits just off the main road about 45 minutes out of Dili, and it’s an easy after-work drive to make it to the beach by sunset.
I asked the friends I went to Mount Ramelau with, and we took advantage of the tent accommodation by the restaurant to spend a day and a night by the sea.
We stayed this close to the ocean and woke up on Saturday morning to the waves.
A long, lazy morning – sitting and reading and swimming and eating and laughing and waiting and more pots of coffee and another duck into the ocean and sandy feet salty wet hair sitting in the shade.
It was beautiful and relaxing – cooler and slower than Dili; just like every day you’d imagine living on a tropical island – but without the grimy dusty mayhem of Dili’s big-city cement and traffic and noise.
We spent almost all of Saturday trading through swimming, reading, talking and relaxing, and then without saying it, started slowly packing up at around 4pm.
We were back in Dili by dark. Sandy and salt-streaked and exhausted from doing nothing and utterly contented with just 24 hours by the sea.
We’ve got a lot more of Timor to see before we go back – and a lot more of real-life Timor to experience before we try too hard to make weekends at Black Rock something normal (I never want this to feel normal). But beyond a shadow of a doubt we’ll be back here one day.
Sophie Rai Liur 
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