Tag: Travel
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Away to Same
In a deeply personal post I shared a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that Felix and I had taken the opportunity of the long weekend to take a quick weekend holiday to Same, pronounced sah-may, near Timor-Leste’s south coast. It’s a quaint little farming town with lofty palm trees and dense green forests, and we…
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One year of language-learning: where I’m at
One of my most pressing language questions when I first arrived in Timor-Leste was trying to figure out the gap between fluency and nothing. I could see how you could collect some broken vocabulary, construct simple sentences, and generally make do with Tetun, and I listened with envy to foreigners speaking Tetun like it’s their mother…
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6 tips for speaking English with a non-native speaker
While English is spoken by a large number of people here in Timor-Leste, the vast majority of people are, of course, not native English speakers. And I suspect this is true of most places in our region. Here are some tips I’ve picked up from my first year living in a country where English isn’t the…
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How to get to Atauro Island
I’ve just returned from a beautiful, lazy week away at Atauro Island, which sits 30 nautical miles off Timor-Leste’s north coast. Without slipping too far into hyperbole, it’s an absolute must-visit for every Dili tourist: a beatific island paradise where the diving’s world-class, the beaches white sand and the coconuts just 50c. I’ve lived in…
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How I shop in Timor-Leste markets
A few small words that helped me last year: satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima. Like Latin proverb they may look, they’re actually the numbers one to five in Bahasa Indonesia, and the key that unlocked the magic of Timor-Leste market shopping for me. Any visitor to Dili will come across the fruit market at Lecidere,…
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Everything we didn’t do in Maubisse
I’ve written before about how much I love the dreamy, mountain town of Maubisse, which sits just 30 kilometres inland of Dili in Ainaro municipality. With Timor’s wind-ey, potholed roads, it can take up to four hours to reach Maubisse by car, and the town thus feels like a real holiday spot: where 30km is…
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Lazy days away in Maubara
Sun-soaked afternoons in a hut by the beach with a book and your bathers and nothing more to do and afternoons never-ending. You need a weekend out of Dili but don’t have the energy for a day-long drive down potholed mountain roads, or the jacked-up car for a trip to a brilliant blue beach. A…
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A field trip packing list
Over the last twelve months, I’ve taken quite a few field trips around Timor-Leste for work, and I’d like to think I’m usually well-prepared. But after packing four skirts, a pair of sandals and a novel for a week in chilly Ainaro late last year, I turned to a friend, an engineer and seasoned field-tripper,…
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How does a travel-hater end up living overseas?
This week I logged into my TripAdvisor account to leave a review of one of my favourite places in Dili. I was surprised to see three reviews already sitting in my profile: places I’d loved in Phnom Penh, which I’d visited while backing through Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam for a couple of months in 2014.…
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January, an update
I realised a few days ago, as I counted back the weeks, that I’ve only been back in Dili from my Christmas trip to Perth for a month. It felt like ten times longer, and I’d spent much of my time back in town vaguely annoyed at myself for feeling uncomfortable, sluggish and unsettled. The…
Sophie Rai Liur 