Among all the palaver of the past couple of weeks, every now and then I wonder what I’m really doing or what direction I’d like my life to take; when I arrived in Dili I had only vague aspirations with no idea whether they were too “out there”, even for me.

One afternoon last week, a girl from one of the local newspapers showed me a place where you can eat for a buck fifty. I’ve no idea what most of what I ate was, but there was chicken and it was deep fried to such an extreme that the bits you wouldn’t normally be able to eat became edible.

That one day was all about finding direction. I had a fear that I would arrive in East Timor, become a hobo or a full-time backpacker and never do anything besides bum around from place to place. Part of me would love to do that, forever, but I need something constructive to do or else I end up spending my time playing with toothpicks.

I had three meetings, if you can call them meetings: one was in a café, one in a restaurant and one, the most important, was a morning meet-up in a dusty yard with about ten people sat in a circle on plastic chairs, moving every few minutes as the sun pushed the shadows back farther. Before the meeting I’d spent half an hour goofing around with some kids in the yard of one of the local churches.

The meeting in the yard was with the staff of a small-time newspaper. Their office is just a dark shack and each of them volunteers his or her time, but (almost) every week on time, they produce a newspaper, half in Tetun, half in English. The passion these people have for producing the newspaper blew me away and to see what they create is amazing. It’s not perfect, but it’s something they’re proud off and can build on.

I sat down unsure what would come of the meeting; they bought me a can of Coke and laid on a spread of biscuits, offering me cigarettes and even presenting me with a traditional Timorese scarf that you hang around your neck equal on both sides. The whole meeting was videotaped and I had my picture taken a few times for an ID card and also for my “formal introduction” in the pages of the newspaper – I think.

For about an hour we talked about the paper and what direction they want to take it. We brainstormed and came up with ideas and plans for how we could make it better. I have nothing better to do so I’ve decided to offer some of my time to work with them. A native English speaker will open up new possibilities and I will have the chance to buddy up with local journalists and go around Dili and the rest of Timor-Leste on the hunt for stories.

It’s a great opportunity for me to learn about the country, to pick up the language, meet a lot of people and realize a lot of the ideas have been stumbling over each other in my head like drunken fools. Funding is a separate issue, but there are people here in Dili who can help and I now have access to the Internet when I need it, so I can make some bucks online in my spare time.

At the moment, from where I’m sat, it’s about as full-proof of a plan as I can possibly muster. I plan to set up an English-language website for the newspaper and begin to build up content, which will attract visitors and then catch the attention of advertisers.

I’m optimistic about this because the possibilities are endless and there are a lot of people here with great ideas.

That’s as good an answer as I can give to the question, What are you going to do in East Timor?

My first few days in Dili have passed by with lightning speed. My time has mostly been spent cycling around and getting a feel for the place. The heat is sweltering, perhaps even more so than in Phuket. The rainy season is due in a couple of months and I’m looking forward to seeing if the storms can match those I saw in Thailand.

I’ve yet to buy a sim card and so I haven’t been able to schedule any meetings with people in Dili, but there’s no rush. I’ve only been here a short time. The woman in charge of sim cards has been out each time I’ve been to the telecom shop, but I’m told she will be back at 8:15 tomorrow morning.

To give you an idea of how much things cost in Dili, a sim card is US$5. East Timor doesn’t have its own currency yet. It also doesn’t have many ATMs. There are three in the whole country, I’m told. A bottle of water off the street costs 25 cents, while a canned soft drink is usually 50 cents. An hour in the Internet shop was a couple of bucks, while meals so far have ranged from US$3 to US$10. I’m trying to keep my costs down at the moment, so when I’m on my own I mostly eat at the restaurants run by the Chinese, although a Chinese guy stung me for $6 for a plate of food and two cans of Coke today, so I won’t be visiting that particular restaurant again.

The beaches I’ve seen so far are nothing out of this world. Some are rocky, some are sandy. They’re all quiet and peaceful, however. I try and stay outside for most of the day and read, work or nap at night. One of the problems with living in East Timor is that the electricity cuts out regularly, so you often find yourself in darkness if your accommodation doesn’t have a generator.

Waking up every morning is easy enough thanks to the chorus of about 5,000 cockerels that erupts at daybreak, followed by 200 dogs going berserk and then about 10 million children with joy. Dili is not a place for late mornings, no matter how tired you are.

Aside from aid workers and the like, there aren’t many foreigners here. I see a few dotted around here and there, but there doesn’t seem to be many people visiting Dili for tourism, which is understandable given the low level of infrastructure and the volatility of the internal situation. East Timor isn’t an obvious place to visit.

There are people trying to kickstart a tourism mini-boom in East Timor, but I think the whole scene needs a lot of support from people with good ideas and people with money, who are not necessarily one and the same. The national park strikes me as an obvious draw and I’m hoping to see it for myself in the next couple of weeks.

There are NGOs working in Dili and teaching the locals English, among other things. The level of English in East Timor is, of course, incredibly low, but given time I don’t see why there couldn’t be companies here with local, English-speaking guides taking tourists on trips around the country, if there aren’t already.

If tourists are to start visiting East Timor, there needs to be a heck of a lot more information available on the Internet and in newspapers and magazines.

A visit to Dili at the moment is gritty experience. I wouldn’t call it fun, per se, but it’s gripping and it tells a story. Perhaps tourists would be interested in such a story.

For anyone who’s ever been to East Timor, it would be great to hear your thoughts on the place and how it might have changed since you visited. Would anyone else swap Thailand for East Timor.

I touched down in Dili, East Timor, on Sunday morning and right from the offset I knew that I’d let myself in for a life very different to how it had been in Thailand over the past three years. I’ve been lucky to have a friend working for an NGO in Dili who has been introducing me to people here and clueing me up on life in East Timor. Without that kind of extra know-how I think my time here would be a lot more difficult.

It will be a challenge for me to do the things I want to do in Dili. I spent today cycling around the city and it was a sobering experience. There are shells of buildings, twisted and torn and decaying; there is poverty on a scale that I have never seen before; there are UN vehicles everywhere and soldiers patrolling the streets; and there are people whose smiles are so full of hope.

None of this is surprising, of course, because I had some idea what to expect, but aside from a city and country shaken to its core, there remains that hope. There is construction work going on, people are full of ideas and plans, investment is coming, and the country seems poised for betterment, but you can’t escape the edginess of the place, even though people have returned to their homes after the internal fighting.

At the moment I am staying at a friend of a friend’s house. A couple of nights ago, two other Western males and I walked from the house to a nearby bar without incident. We had dinner and drinks and returned home about midnight. Last night, in the house on my own, I took the same walk down the street, which is unlit, at about 8 am and the vibe was considerably different.

A few locals said “Hello”, as people do, but then a young, shirtless guy, probably no older than me, approached me and said, “Come here.” I continued walking and he didn’t come any closer, but repeated his question, saying, “Come here, I want to show you something.” I pointed down the road and said I was going to carry on walking and he backed off.

A few more metres down the road and something similar happened. A group of youths sat around a fire called out, but not in the way a group in Thailand would call out – there was no softness in their voices. One of them motioned to follow, but then sat down again.

I carried on down the road and within one minute a middle-aged, weary-looking man in a tattered football kit was following me, less than two metres behind me. There were other people around so I gave him a sideways glance and crossed the road. Without hesitation he followed me until he was walking adjacent to where I was. I turned to face the man, looked him in the eyes and said, “Are you OK?” He backed off for a few moments, but then caught up with me once more.

The feeling that overcame me was mostly frustration for having put myself in this situation. I walked to the nearby street corner, which was lit and full of people, and swung a left, closely followed by my admirer, who soon caught the attention of a group of guys sat on their motorbikes chatting. They said something to him, told me, “No problem,” and my stalker skulked off and sat down in a doorway, looking unmoved by the whole affair.

It wasn't a particularly rough walk, but being in a new country I decided to call it quits and catch a taxi back home as I really didn’t have a destination in mind when I left the house. Most shops shut at 6 pm here and the streets tend to be unlit.

But these are just the first impressions of someone who, at the time of writing, has been in Dili for less just a couple of days. I’m still feeling positive about East Timor and tomorrow is another day. Most important for me is that I don’t take this place for granted. Foreign workers here are of the mindset that the tension in East Timor could boil over and lead to further conflict. There are people here with nothing – no jobs, no money, no food – but at the same time there are organizations out to change that.

I really have no idea what my time in East Timor is going to bring, but I know that I have goals to achieve (study and work related) and I have to focus on those while keeping my surroundings in perspective and experiencing this place. I have several people in Dili to contact over the next few days, so that should keep me occupied for the foreseeable future.

The trouble that has been going on in Thailand over the past couple of weeks looking unequivocally trivial compared to the problems in East Timor.

So I’m in Dili, I’m safe and I’m insured.