Be a fish

The thing about being a developing country is that there are few laws and rules.  This gives great scope for law and rule creation.  Officials have the luxury of looking around the world and picking and choosing those laws and rules that they think might best suit their requirements.  It sounds like a law-maker's utopia.  Maybe.  The challenge is that when you're importing laws and rules you need to give more than a passing thought to the environment in which those laws and rules operate.

The rules to which I currently refer are the road rules.  Malae tend to look at Dili's traffic with a mix of horror and awe.  There appears to be absolutely no system and yet the traffic moves.  On one of the two round-abouts people simply enter with apparent disregard for on-coming traffic.  Why?  Why?  Why?  I have asked myself on more than one occasion.

Ah my friends, I shall share the secret - Portuguese road rules.  Seeing as how Portugal 'settled' Timor, there remains a stalwart connection.  Dare I tempt republican fury by suggesting this is similar to our connections with England?  Like a child, marvelling at the efficiency of the mother country, Timor-Leste has adopted her road rules.  This, you might consider to be efficient and effective.  It could be, and indeed it would have been except for one slightly important fact - the Portuguese drive on the right-hand side of the road, the Timorese drive on the left. . . .and they have adopted the laws exactly as they are.

Think about it.  In Australia we give way on the right.  That makes sense.  In Portugal, they drive on the opposite side of the road and so give way on the left.  In Dili, we drive on the left-hand side of the road and give way on the left.

Soooooooo, even though you are on the roundabout, you have to give way on the left.  This means that entering traffic has right of way.  It is apparently the same at intersections, driveways and basically anywhere vehicles require entrance to a roadway.

Having despaired of what appears to me to be a non-system, and having been almost run into by a taxi, I expressed my exasperation to my Pilates instructor.

"You have to be a fish," she told me.  "Swim with the school.  When the school weaves, weave.  Otherwise everyone ends up dodging each other.  To stay safe, you just need to learn to be a fish."

A fish, huh?  Hey, I should have a headstart on that . . . I am a Pisces after all.  ;-)