In the wild
It was about four in the afternoon and I was on Rote Island, West Timor, sat in someone's front yard with half a dozen bare-chested, tough-looking Indonesian chaps. We were drinking sopi, (arak) as you do on a sunny Saturday afternoon. There were a lot of children milling about and it was a beautiful day.
I was called into the house and given a plate of rice, salted fish, chopped tomato and sambal, and that weird, bitter, green vegetable people love over here. While I was eating, five of the village boys and girls came into the house looking for someone. Before I knew it, there was a sound system blasting and the children were involved in a traditional dance class.
After I'd finished eating I went outside and looked around. There were puppies all over the place. I sat down and continued my afternoon drinking session while the dancers shuffled about.
It could have been a scene in Timor-Letse. It was eerily reminiscent of my experiences on the eastern side of the island of Timor. Even the music was the same. The people looked the same. The houses were the same. The table with a single glass and a plastic water bottled full of liqueur was the same.
I hadn't seen another foreigner for about a week. Everywhere I went, people gawped at me as if I were an alien. Foreigners do visit Rote Island, but it's usually around March time or else in October when there's a big surf jam. The majority of tourist movement is around the beaches.
I went to the beaches on stunning, clear days and was more or less the only person there. I saw no bars, discos, nightclubs, backpackers or anything at all really except for a few shells and some seaweed.
That night, while riding back with friends to the place I was staying, we stopped off to buy some "special" sopi that a man made in the back of his house. While I was sat in the front room with half a dozen children and a few old people, a woman of about 20 poked her head thought the front door and just for moment I caught sight of her before she quickly retreated and ran round the back.
She looked like a Western woman, with pale skin and short, scruffy blonde hair. The image of seeing her for that second or two was striking. I found out that her father was Australian and her mother Timorese. She had a beautiful face, although she was chronically shy.
To all intents and purposes she was Indonesian, but there in the middle of a jungle village on a tiny island, she was an unexpected sight, much as I was no doubt.
After we got back home my friends cracked open the special sopi. I don't consider myself a hardened drinker and I get drunk easily, but I can drink and do shots and I'd had a lot of practise drinking tua sabu with my friends in Timor-Leste, so I wasn't expected anything out of the ordinary.
Tua sabu is usually about 60 or 70%, I believe, and we often mix it with beer. But this sopi' holy cow. I'm sure it was about as close to drinking pure alcohol as I've ever come. It wasn't so much an after taste as an afterburn that lingered in my throat.
I'd read stories about people going blind or else dying after drinking arak, so I decided to play it cool and just do one more shot before going to bed. I think we paid 20,000 rupiah for a 1.5-litre bottle full of the stuff.
Of course, drinking arak is nothing special. You see tourists drinking it with the surfer boys in Bali all the time. But this stuff was home-brewed on Rote Island, away from the masses.
I would probably struggle to live on Rote Island as there isn't a whole lot to do or eat, but for a change of scenery, it was like all the parts of Timor-Leste I love without any of the bits I find frustrating.
On a side note, I will be in Bangkok December 27 until January 1, then in Bali until January 4, then in Salatiga until February 12, then in Bali again until about February 20, after which I assume I will go to Timor-Leste for a while and then back to Kupang. Should I be blessed with a little bit of luck, I might then be in London for a year from September.
