“I love this vehicle because it goes everywhere,” João said on a number of occasions throughout the trip. As we all eventually learned, he was right. It really did go everywhere.
We never actually made it out of town until 4pm. Political rallying through the streets for the upcoming elections brought traffic to a standstill, so we waited it out, filled up with gas, and headed north for the hills once everything cleared up. Along the way, we stopped for coffee at a lookout overlooking Dili and the Wetar Strait. (The cake was delicious.) From there, the narrow road rose through green hills and villages carved into the mountainside. We moved at a steady pace, trying to make good time as the sun set around 6:30pm. But this wasn't so easy. The road often ended and crumbled at parts, forcing us to stop before proceeding slowly over the asphalt, dirt, rocks, or whatever happens to be under your tires. We came up above the cloud line and drove through a village that looked as if it lived eternally in between these clouds – old women walked along the road through the thick fog, carrying baskets of food and jugs of water. When night fell we had only just made it to Maubisi – the largest town along the way before we were to turn northwest for 28km to our base camp, Hatubulico. It would be difficult driving there in the dark, as apparently even during the day the 28km can take up to an hour and a half! Heading towards where we thought this northwest-bound road should be, we asked anyone who happened to appear in our headlights for the way. A man told us that he would take us 10km up the road from Maubisi and show us the turn-off, so we followed him into the darkness, honking every few hundred meters to get him to slow down while we navigated the potholes and boulders on the road.
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| Village Between the Clouds |
When we arrived at the turn-off, he gave us directions and drew a map indicating the main forks in the route and which way we should follow. This map would prove to be indispensable. From the turn-off, after a kilometer or so we came upon a bamboo fence stretched across the dirt road. We tried to determine whether we had missed one of the forks and traveled down the wrong way, but our intuition told us to open the fence and continue along the way. Stepping out of the car and looking up to the sky revealed one of the most amazing skies I've seen for about as long as I can remember. The moon had not risen yet and we were ways away from any light pollution. The sky was filled with galaxies, satellites, shooting stars, planets, even the arms of the Milky Way. It seemed like there was more light in the sky than there was darkness. I got out my trusty Smartphone and booted up Google Sky and spent the next half hour exploring the sky of the southern hemisphere. Mars and Saturn were out that night.
Soon though, we had to keep moving, and we set out down the road, slowly, with our eyes wide open, looking for the right turns to make and avoiding the wrong ones. After a while, doubt and uncertainty began to grow and we began second guessing our previous decisions. How far had we come? What if we had missed a turn? When we noticed in the distance the brief beam of a flashlight halfway up a hill, this gave us an excuse to stop and make sure that we had not gone astray. João and I got out of the Pajero to reach the light and ask for directions to realign us on the right road. João was in front and walked behind the vehicle. I came up behind him, where he was calling out to someone in the darkness who we could hear walking towards us.
“Bon noite”(good evening), João said. “Diak kelai?” (how are you). There was no response – just the sound of rustling grass moving towards us. “Maun (man), bon noite,” João said louder. “Diak kelai?” Still, nothing.
“Go get the flashlight,” João whispered, and I retrieved it from the Pajero and quicky ran back to where João was standing. He now seemed a bit more frightened as the approaching noise was only a few metres way now. “Bon noite maun!” He said. There was still no reply, so I turned on the flashlight and shone it ahead, revealing a small horse standing at the side of the road, eating grass.
As the horse was not very talkative, João and I walked up a ridge with the flashlight in the direction of the light we had seen previously while Charu and Chris waited inside the vehicle. We eventually found a man sitting outside his house with his family. He confirmed that we were indeed headed in the right direction, and wished us good luck. Our doubts were assuaged.
We continued along the road, switchbacking up ridges and making best-guess decisions as to which roads to follow. After about 12 or so more kilometers, we came to yet another fork in the road. This decision was more difficult – to the left the road descended into a valley. To the right it turned upward, but seemed to narrow into parts that looked grown over. I got out of the vehicle and began walking down the more major path, eventually finding myself in some mud as a stream flowed down the trail. But in the distance I could see a few faint lights higher up in my field of vision, as if they were positioned on the side of a mountain. That must be Hatubalico – basecamp. And so we followed the path down into the valley as the road became increasingly rugged. The moon was rising and visibility increased enough to allow us to maintain a steady speed. The road began climbing upwards again, and soon the signs of some huts and even a few lit street lamps suggested that we had made it. Hatubalico – basecamp – the City of Lights. We soon found our Pousada (there was only one road in town), and woke up a man sleeping on the couch in the lobby. It was after 11pm. On the table in the dining room we saw an empty bottle of wine and some dirty plates. A group of Portuguese had arrived here earlier in the day (in the daylight, smartly), who were also due to climb in the morning.
We were starving, so the kitchen fixed us up some noodles. The interior decor was rather interesting – on the walls stuffed animals were hung from nails. We went to sleep as soon as the noodles were in our stomachs under the watchful eye of the nailed up teddy bears above us. The plan was to leave with our guide at 3am in the morning.
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| Charming Decor at the Hatubalico Pousada |
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| Luxurious Accomodation |
Of course, with less than 3 hours of sleep, we missed our 2:30am alarm. I could hear some commotion and Charu talking with the guide, some miscommunication between them, and then minutes later, the sound of vehicles taking off into the night. While we were up and ready to go at 3:00, the group of Portuguese and the guide had left a few minutes early.
However, after the trials of the previous night, we could not be deterred, and we set off after them in the Pajero. That is, at least in the direction we had thought they had headed (“which way did you hear the sound of the engine leave?”). There couldn’t have been too many roads out of town, we figured, and it should have been clear how to get to the trail head. But leaving town we soon found three roads heading in the direction of the mountain. We picked the last one, as we reached it last, and drove for around 30 minutes on the most broken road that we had encountered so far, practically crawling along over rocks in 4 wheel drive, staying as close we could to the cliff face so not as to tumble off the side. Chris chimed in that we should just park, get out, and start climbing up the mountain. I told João that he should find the nearest horse and ask him for directions.
“You know Chris, that’s probably risky,” João replied, while ignoring my suggestion. Despite our sleep deprivation, we still had some sense left in us.
We had enough sense to remember that we had the phone number of the Pousada on us as well as a cell phone. João called them and apologized for waking them up in the middle of the night, explaining we were lost, and asking which was the correct road to the trail head. The manager, patient and helpful, had a better idea: turn around, come back the way you came, and come back to the Pousada – he would find us a guide and who would take us up.
The guide turned out to be the manager’s 14 year old nephew, Rui. He knew precisely where to go and it was not long before we were at the trail head and beginning our ascent. I’m not sure if it was the altitude, lack of sleep, lack of food, or lack of exercise over the past little while, but I found it to be challenging, not so much physically, but in terms of keeping the breath in me. But as I’ve learned with hiking, once you get into a rhythm and past the point of no return, it always gets easier. Sure enough, we picked up the pace to reach the summit just as the sun was coming up. Both sides of the island and the ocean meeting them could be seen from either direction. The view up top was remarkable and well worth the journey. We stayed up at the summit for a while and enjoyed the panorama with blankets wrapped around us (except for myself, who had read about this mountain back in Canada and packed a north face fleece in anticipation of hiking it). We met a man up there who had lived in a small shed at the summit for a year and a half. His job was to guard a small telecommunications tower that sat at the top. The police would bring him rations of food from time to time.
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| Sunrise on top of Ramelau |
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| Enlightened Security Guard |
Descending down the mountain was like a whole other trail, for the way up our only guiding light was the stars and the moon. Now, the scenery was fully in view. After we reached the bottom, we drove back to the Pousada, paid our guide, and got a couple hours of sleep. We were fed stale bread and coffee when we awoke, and packed up our belongings. We parted ways with Mount Ramelau and headed back to Dili in the little jeep that goes everywhere, stopping only for some fresh guava and gasoline on the way back down.
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| Early Morning Descent |
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| Guavas for the Way Home |
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