Every now and then I check up on what the latest from the country is and it seems to be more like a sitcom each I time I look. With every development since the coup, the situation has become more farcical. But that’s just the way it is in Thailand.

In January last year I wrote a blog post about Thaksin quitting politics. There was a big song and dance about Thailand’s former PM retiring from politics for good. He’d had enough and just couldn’t stand it anymore.

As well as divorcing his wife, Thaksin is now returning to politics. Jatuporn Promphan from PPP was quoted in the Nation saying, “Khun Thaksin will announce on December 14 that he will return to politic [sic] to fight to defend his name. He will no longer stand still. He decided to come out to fight as he did not want to be attacked and cornered any more.”

So the man is back and it’s going to be a fight to the death. Apparently – and this is perhaps the most baffling part of the story – Thaksin divorced his wife because he is returning to politics. But, get this, “their divorce does not mean that they are no longer in love”.

Thailand is the world’s biggest sitcom.

I’ve become more cynical – I guess that’s one thing that has changed. I dislike organized religion more than ever. Christianity in particular bothers me. One thing I feel very positive about, however, is East Timor. I seem to be spending most of my time working or hanging out with the locals. I have lots of Western contacts here, but I wouldn’t call them friends. The Western friends I do have I don’t see very often, which is something I didn’t envisage before I came here.

More than anything my time in East Timor has been one of reflection and learning about people. Last night I was with some young FRETILIN supporters and what they told me was both intriguing and terrifying, but I’ll leave that for another day. I passed on the offer of going to a club and ended up home about midnight I think.

My views on relationships haven’t changed. I see marriage as unnecessary and I certainly don’t want children.

I’m looking forward to going home next month. I’ll have about a week in the UK to catch up with friends and then a week in France to see my mother and brother. I know that it means a lot to my mum that I’m going home for Christmas. I am certain she will start crying as soon as she sees me.

After Europe it looks as if I will arrive in Bali at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve, which is not an ideal situation to be in, especially after flying Bordeaux to Paris to Doha to Denpasar in the space of a day.

But that’s life.

The frustrations of being a freelance writer are many.

So I walked down the same street and groups of people greeted me and I stopped to chat with a few of them. They asked me where I was going and what I was doing. A few kids knew my name, although when they said it I think they were calling me Max, rather than Matt. One child half-heartedly asked me for a dollar and I smiled at him.

I got down to the end of the road and turned left towards the stadium where I met a group of about 10 guys sat on the pavement. “Tua sabu?” they asked. I drank a lot of tua sabu (palm brandy) when I was in Ainaro so I decided to join the group of ruffians by the road.

Two months ago I’d have been terrified of this group, but now that I’ve settled in I’ve seen a different side of Dili. There are some dangerous areas, as there are in any city. Even the Timorese will tell you that out towards the airport is a dodgy spot.

We drank together for about half an hour and then I went down to Motion bar to read some of my book. I stayed at Motion for an hour and then walked back to meet the street kids again. I say “street kids”, but these guys were all about my age or older.

We drank and smoked and talked about the things guys talk about: football, girls, smoking pot, life. We talked about how Real Madrid are more concerned with looking good and making money than playing with heart. They told me that it is better to be single and free than to be married. It is, apparently, difficult to sleep around in Timorese culture without ending up tying the knot.

The conversation turned to prostitution at some point and there was also mention of an Irish man’s wife. At least one of the guys had been getting intimate with the wife.

We all agreed that it’s silly to have a national language – Portuguese – that nobody can speak and that English is more useful. They were very apologetic for not being able to speak fluent English and I was sorry for being so bad at speaking Tetun.

Eventually we ran out of tua sabu and I figured it was my round as I’d been drinking their booze all night. We walked down a muddy backstreet to a house where a lady sold us two liters of tua sabu for three dollars.

We carried on drinking. One of the guys was so drunk that he fell asleep on the sidewalk. Another lost the ability to speak coherently before a bus arrived and he left for Viqueque. I was drunk out of my mind on dirty liqueur. It was about midnight and I confessed that I was going to have to go to bed.

The rabble decided to walk me home so we stumbled back up the road towards where I live. I was struggling to walk in a straight line. Before I knew it, I was at my door with my gang in tow. We shook hands and there was the offer of hanging out again.

I opened the front door and found my way to bed. My head was spinning and I spent a long time contemplating throwing up before I passed out asleep and woke up ten hours later.

It was a good night because foreigners in Timor spend a lot of time talking about how there are so many groups of young men hanging around on the streets at night with nothing to do. I figured it couldn’t hurt to talk to these young men and get to know them a bit better.

What I’m most curious about is to see what people have been doing and compare stories about how we’ve spent our early twenties. As far as I’m aware, almost all of my friends still live in England and most of them have traveled a bit, even if only for a few weeks.

With the people I went to school with I feel confident that we will be able to slip into a familiar groove and vibe like old times. I think it will be the same with most of the folks I was friends with in Sheffield. But I’m worried that I might go back to Bath or London or Sheffield and people won’t recognize me. I don’t think I’m much taller than I used to be, but I’m sure my face has changed and I’m also more tanned.

If I do go back I will also visit my mother and brother in France, where they now live. My mother has a boyfriend I’ve never met and my brother, well, he’s still a mystery to me.

It’s exciting because I’m going to try and cram as many different cities into my trip as possible. I expect I will only go for about three weeks, but it would be a good way to end the year and to see what I’m missing.

I don’t imagine there will be much of a reverse culture shock other than feeling very cold all the time. What I can’t wait to do is to buy a family pack of Monster Munch and a four-pack of Woodpecker cider.

I’m still as simple as when I left.

Other plans include a month-long trip to China in February, a trip to parts of Indonesia in January and more travels out to the districts of East Timor.

My first trip was to a small island off the coast of Dili called Atauro. It’s a beautiful spot and it’s made even better by the fact that hardly any tourists go there so it’s very peaceful. I stayed in an eco-lodge and did a lot of walking through the hills.

My most recent trip was to a district in south-eastern Timor called Viqueque. A friend of mine is partner in a hotel out there so I went to see what it was like. The Timorese countryside is fantastic. We went caving, swam in natural swimming pools, watched cockfighting and one day I even found a scorpion on my bag.

It’s only a matter of time before more people see these places. More photos on my Flickr.

There was a lot of salsa dancing going on. I was happy to just bop by myself, but at some point a lady, she may have been Portuguese, started teaching me to dance.

The other couples on the dance floor were flinging each other around in circles, twisting and turning with ease. You have to lead me, said the lady. I’m freaking trying, I replied.

I was taken back to about 10 days before, when I had been taught Timorese dancing. I quickly mastered that left-left-right-left-left-right shuffle. But this salsa had me beat.

You have to lead me, said the lady again. I could see she was frustrated. My years of dancing to house, techno, trance and drum n bass music were no help. I felt like a kitten stranded in the middle of a highway.

After two songs the lady decided it would be better to leave me to my own devices. I’m not built for salsa dancing – I hate it. There may come a day when I change my mind about all of this, but for the foreseeable future I don’t want to dance – I can’t dance.

The big question is, Would I like salsa dancing if I could do it better? I don’t have an answer.

I have a story on Asia Times Online called “East Timor tries to buy some time“.

The restaurant scene in Dili is dire. I eat most of my meals at the local warungs. The food is simple and it usually tastes reasonable. The hardcore local joints charge about $1 or $1.50 for a plate of food. I get as much satisfaction eating at these places as I do eating at the more-expensive restaurants.

Moving up the scale there are restaurants serving Chinese and Indonesian food for about $3 to $4 a plate. These places are like buffets where you have a little bit of everything and they are probably my favorite restaurants in Dili. Starco is one that springs to mind and Terrace Café is also decent.

At the far end of the scale there are the expat restaurants. Sushi, burgers, pizza, kebabs, whatever you want: you can find it in Dili. Unfortunately the food at these eateries is average at best. I haven’t been impressed by any of Dili’s expat restaurants. It’s not that they’re expensive because the food is cheaper than at many of the restaurants I ate at in Phuket, but there’s nothing that really excites the palate.

I miss Thailand for its food, for all the hidden-away spots I used to eat at, for all the street vendors, for all the restaurants. I didn’t expect the food in Timor to be exceptional, but living in Thailand I became rather spoiled in terms of what I ate. Food was exciting, much like it was during my recent trip to Ainaro. Those people sure know how to eat.

Other than that everything is OK.

The lack of posting going on here is due to me spending a week out in the wilderness. Although I have never been keen on traveling and darting about from country to country, cramming as many destinations into each week as possible, I still get a buzz from living in new places and experiencing different cultures. Last week was my chance to see what life is like for many out in the districts of Timor-Leste.

I was in Matenu, a small village in Ainaro. From one day to the next I had no idea what was in store. It was the kind of trip that many people would hate. We traveled for five hours in the back a pickup truck. There were about twenty of us: fifteen adults, five or six children, one buffalo and a pig. The truck dropped us off a hefty walk through the hills from our final destination.

We slept outside in makeshift marquees made of bamboo and tarpaulin. The ground was hard and the temperature dipped dramatically after sundown. In the mornings we bathed and swam in a river with kids splashing about all over the place.

During the day we drank coffee, whisky, palm brandy and beer. Sometimes we even drank water. Being out in the hills, the combination of altitude, caffeine, alcohol and heat meant that we were all out of our minds most of the time. People from neighboring villages and sub districts arrived until there were at least a hundred of us, with numbers swelling up to three hundred towards the end of the week.

Many of the people in Manetu harvest coffee. They also grow potatoes and other vegetables. But people came from miles around bringing pigs and buffaloes and goats and we ate like kings. It didn’t take long to get used to the sight and sound of animals being slaughtered and chopped up for cooking. Pigs in particular scream for their lives like a human would, but I had never eaten pork that tasted so divine.

The main activity during the week was dancing. By day we danced outside to the beat of a drum, while at night the generator powered a sound system and we danced under cover until the sun came up. Everyone danced: the old, the young, the men, the women, the guy with one arm, the people in traditional Timorese dress.

At other times I walked through the hills, stopping off at huts now and then, invited in for cups of coffee. For seven days I didn’t see another foreigner and the Timorese welcomed me into their lives with big smiles and shots of palm brandy, which, by the way, tastes much better than palm wine.

There’s so much more to tell, but after a week away I now find myself with a mountain of work and freelance assignments to sift through along with dozens of emails to reply to and follow up. But still, I had a great week and haven’t for one moment regretted my decision to leave Thailand.

Returning to Dili was a deflating experience and I felt disassociated from the city. Many things just didn’t seem right. It was like coming down.

Later it occurred to me that the waiter probably didn’t even realize it was a tip. Something similar happened in Bali. My girlfriend and I were clueless as to the value of rupiah (far too many zeros) and we ended up giving a thousand-rupiah tip to the bellboy, which I think works out about 10 baht.

In Thailand I usually tipped any shrapnel (coins) handed back or else 20 baht. The main places to tip are restaurants and bars. I wouldn’t usually tip after buying a bottle of beer, but might have for a bottle of whiskey. Vendors of street food don’t expect tips, but most restaurants do. I hate being given change in one of those folding wallets, but there’s no escaping them.

In Dili I’m faced with a tipping dilemma: do you or don’t you? The issue seems to be a point of contention in expat circles. Some people tip at every opportunity while others see this as setting up a level of expectation from foreigners. I’ve already seen that, like the Thais, the Timorese see foreigners as rich. I don’t know if there is any level of resentment.

So far I haven’t being tipping in Dili. I don’t think it’s expected and I don’t want it to be. It seems common only in the Western bars and restaurants out here and therefore tipping is reserved only for expats and foreigners, which I think is ludicrous.

The best tip I was ever given while working as a barman in Sheffield was seven pounds. It was given to me by an extremely drunk girl who’d recently been paid some kind of loan, possibly her student loan. I should have declined the tip, but I was saving for my travels and wanted the money. The girl then stalked me for about two weeks and even turned up at my house one night. The life and times of Matt Crook.

What do other people think about tipping?

From one day to the next in Thailand people just moaned about the state of the place. It’s not that people shouldn’t be able to criticize the country in which they live, but here in Timor-Leste the expats see an overwhelming positive side, despite everything that has happened and could still happen. I haven’t been able to pinpoint why this positive mindset exists, but I imagine it stems from foreigners living here and working in jobs they’ve devoted at least part of their lives to.

The nightlife scene in Dili is interesting. There are more bars and clubs than I thought there would be. Almost all are aimed at foreigners, but I get the impression that the people running these nightspots to support themselves do a lot of work in the community.

About a week ago a bunch of us ended up at a Mexican party. It was surreal: a Mexican party in the middle of Dili. There were hundreds of people there and I heard “Macarena” twice. I didn’t really dig the party because I’m kind of anti-social in large groups of strangers.

My friend and I snuck out of the party around midnight and walked back home. We passed a little shack where half a dozen local ruffians were playing pool. What the heck, we thought, and we rolled up to the shack to say hi.

We put up a buck-fifty and played a game of two-on-two pool that involved shooting the balls in ascending order while one guy turned over playing cards. I never found out what the playing cards were for, but through sheer drunken luck we won the game and got back our buck-fifty and, I think, the stake of our opponents.

Although my end of the conversation was limited, hanging out with those bare-chested kids, who looked to be in their early-twenties, was a better deal than being at the party. This all happened on the road where just a few nights before an old, haggard man had stalked me down the street.

More than anything I’m enjoying being a part of the local community here. As tough and wary as the locals look on the outside, they are good, warm people and I feel humbled to live among them.

Note: For some strange reason I posted a draft of an unfinished blog post (this post) and gave it the headline and picture of the post I was trying to publish, which is actually about tipping.

The local wine turned out to be palm wine and we came across a woman selling it by the side of the road. I’d previously thought the woman was selling some kind of petrol. “You want some?” I asked my friend. He did.

I really only wanted a cup full, if that, but ended up with a 1.5-liter bottle of off-white liquid. First impressions were that it smells like raw eggs. I took a cautious sip and shuddered at the strong, bitter taste that bore no resemblance to any kind of wine I have ever drunk. My friend took a big gulp while the lady selling the wine looked confused.

I bit the bullet and took a bigger sip, but the combination of the potent smell and the overpowering taste made me reel back for a moment. I coughed a little and decided that my palm-wine-drinking days would be short-lived.

In the end I spent 50 cents on the enormous bottle of wine, which my friend was glad to divvy up into two bottles: one for me and one for him. I thought, Perhaps I could save it for special occasions.

The mikrolet journey back was marred by the omnipotent odor of the palm wine. My friend drank a little more and when we got off the mikrolet he confessed that he was a little drunk.

Palm wine, my friend told me, is made from the young leaves of palm trees. What I bought is the unboiled version; the boiled form of palm wine costs $2 or so for a 600-milliliter bottle.

Palm wine is what the locals drink. It costs about the same as water and is an awful lot cheaper than imported beer. It’s an acquired taste that I’ve yet to acquire, but with perseverance I’m certain a person could grow to love palm wine.

I never thought I’d come across a drink that could match rice whiskey, but palm wine is it. My small bottle of wine remains untouched, hidden in a shoe-stand where its outrageous aroma can go undetected.

Some horns start off with a regular beep followed by a series of successive beeps decreasing in volume until the beep is no more. It sounds kind of like a beep driving off into the distance beyond the horizon, when in fact the car responsible is right next to you.

The ones that get me every time are the tuneful horns, which blast out a quick melody of beeps, sometimes followed by a successive series of quieter melodies. You’d think the circus had come to town, but it’s usually just a microlet (like a tiny breadbin of a minibus) looking for passengers.

Some guys have gone the whole hog and made their cars into spaceships by making their horns sound like lasers. The whole thing is just so ridiculous that you have to laugh. Nobody has a clue what’s going on with the diverse assortment of beeping styles. I never know whether I’m coming or going or who is beeping at who and for what.

If there were more cars on the road, like in Bangkok, this place would be chaos. As it is, most people don’t really know how to drive and so the average speed of a car in Dili seems to be only about 40kmh.

I hope to goodness that Dili doesn’t become like Bangkok in terms of traffic; there would be thousands of accidents every day. You should see some of the manoeuvres the UN vehicles pull.