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.