Border Patrol, Visa Vis or Mission: Mandy’s Working Visa Part IV

When I last left you, no doubt clinging to the edge of your seats with the suspense of it all, I was awaiting the return of my visa from the Indonesian embassy.  Well, I didn’t get my passport back on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday.  No, it wasn’t the Indonesians it was because I was too slack to pick it up myself and Jimi was actually doing the job he’s paid to do and that doesn’t always include visa runs for teachers who are too lazy to get their bum on their scooter seat and ride a few blocks.

Still, there was no rush.  My paperwork from East Timor still hadn’t come through – despite my boss ringing That Woman and questioning her “pushing through” skills.  So I did what was guaranteed to make the universe take a hand in pushing said paperwork through – I made extensive plans for Saturday; Pilates in the morning, followed by a couple of hours rest before a run up a hill, followed by a quick shower and a barbecue on the beach.  Worked a treat because I’d barely stepped into the school on Friday morning when my boss said, “Paperwork’s done!”

That Woman was to arrive any minute with the required pages.  Jimi furnished my passport and I texted Adeline, another teacher who needed to go to the border the next day because her paperwork was about to expire.  To be fair the East Timorese do give you a month to get from Dili to the border – a physical distance of about 100km that takes about three hours to drive . . . but we aren’t on that road just yet.

One way to get to the border is by bus.  Mikrolets regularly drive the route.  So too does a bigger bus from Timor Travel.  Jimi booked me and Adeline on the latter for the forward journey.  For the return journey we were to attempt to ‘bargain’ a spot on the bus coming back.  Right.  I could see me doing that . . . though I wasn’t entirely convinced that being able to say, “Good morning good afternoon, good evening and how much?” in Tetun was really going to be useful in that situation.  Adeline, on the other hand, is from The Philippines and speaks Bahasa or Indonesian.  Right then.  We agreed to meet at the school at 7am the next day.  Thunderbirds, were, if not entirely go, at least prepared for the getting there.

At 6am the next morning, seconds before my talking alarm bleated, “It’s time to get up.  It’s time to get up” (Seriously it does this until I turn it off.)  my phone rang. 

“We’re going to drive,” Adeline told me.  “We need to change the tire.  No rush.  We’ll be at the school by 8 or 9.”

Right then.  Can’t argue with that . . . especially the “no rush” part.  I reset my alarm and went back to sleep. 

Our driver was Vicente who works at the school.  Given what I’ve witnessed on the roads I should have been alarmed at having a Timorese driver, but he had previously worked as a driver to Western tourists and was remarkably skilled in pot hole dodging.

So we set out.  The pictures do not do the road justice.  The coastal road is apparently better than the inland route and let me just advise anyone ever attempting to get to the border from Dili:  Do not take the inland route!!!

The pot holes  on the coastal road were not only deep, some stretched across the road so Vicente was forced to drive on the shoulder while dodging oncoming vehicles, children, chickens, dogs, pigs (and some really, really cute piglets) and even a monkey.  Adeline brought a picnic and we stopped for coffee at a restaurant because poor Vicente had been co-opted into driving before he’d even had his coffee.  How did the guy navigate through Dili traffic without a morning caffeine hit?  It makes the feat so much more admirable.

The coastline is beautiful.  The sea is that amazing aqua; the terrain to the left is hillier and so workers are building retaining walls to halt the flow of any nature that might seek to slide down the hill. Apparently they’re a little bit late because the aim was to fix it so there weren’t landslides but since the rain season has already begun and they seem to have completed only a limited section they may be re-doing some of it.  Still, I have to say the rock walls are exquisite. 

We drove ever onwards.  At the longest bridge in Timor Vicente commented that the buses can’t go across it because “bridge is broken”.  Mini buses were parked, their passengers apparently walking or having walked to the other side to connect with another mini bus that would take them onwards to the border.  It might have been intelligent to question why, if the bridge was broken were we dodging the barriers to drive across said bridge; or at the very least to ask exactly how the bridge was broken and so assess its sturdiness for our crossing.  I didn’t.  I just looked at the scenery hoping a local would know what was safe and what wasn’t.  Besides I’m a terrible in-transit traveller; I like to get where I’m going. 

Eventually we arrived at the border town of Batugade.  The border itself is a little ways along, but it’s here that if you’ve the opportunity and the mind to seize it, you can make the border process a whole lot easier.  It’s never what you know, always who you know, or even who happens to be travelling in your back seat with you.  We didn’t know the Indonesian immigration official; never even learnt his first name.  What we did know was that he wanted to go to the border and that we had the space to accommodate him.  It actually didn’t occur to us how useful he might be.

See, when you cross from East Timor into Indonesia, you have to do so on foot.  You can only take your car if you’ve purchased a $25 permit from the Indonesia Embassy in Dili.  Otherwise, vehicles are strictly prohibited. . . unless . . . unless . . .

We arrived at the East Timor border, parked and disembarked.  Adeline called the Immigration Director to tell him we’d arrived at what I can describe as a donger, a couple of toilet blocks and an undercover area in a big car park – without the cars.  The Director assured Adeline that his people were there.  We filled in our ‘departing country’ forms, had our passports examined and we were off to the next checkpoint.

Adeline gave the Timorese officials a bottle of coke, we collected our Indonesian immigration official and headed onwards.  At the Indonesian border, Adeline and I proffered our passports.  The guards peered into the car, noticed our ‘cargo’, smiled and waved us through.  Even Vicente and Annika (a young friend of Adeline’s who was with us for the adventure) got waved through – with no visa and no passport!  

The Indonesian side was much like the Timorese side.  Basically we went to arrivals where we had to fill in our “arrivals” card.  The officials were very prompt with our processing.  They queried the fact that we hadn’t put the address of where we were staying in Indonesian but were easily placated with the comment “working visa” and a wave of said documentation.  They pointed us to a window at the other end of the building.  The officials there examined our documentation and sent us around the corner to another building where we were given “departure cards”.  We filled these in and submitted them at the last window in the building.  We’d done a circumnavigation, if not of West Timor itself, at least of their immigration building.  Then we got back in the car and headed East.

Back on the East Timor side our documentation was checked, our names and passport numbers noted down in a big ledger.  Then we went back to the building where we first started.  The guard there very politely told us, that we were at the “departures” window.  “Arrivals” was around the other side.  We trotted round the donger and found the “arrivals” window shut.  Within seconds it opened and the guard from barely seconds ago smiled. 

We handed over our working visa documentation, fifty dollars each and our passports.  They stamped and signed and stapled and then we were done.   

After a couple of photos we loaded back into the car and were off, driving past the travellers waiting for their chance to negotiate a seat on the Timor Travel bus back to Dili.