Around 99% of any shops, restaurants and businesses were closed on the 1st. But not the liquor store

Lot of chickens for sale, at small street stalls, here.

Fishermen hang their nets on the trees, for the night.

View from Sky Bar @Timor Plaza shopping mall

They're several public rest areas at the promenade, recycling old tires 😎

Motorbikes are the primary transportation, here, too.

Tais are the traditional clothing, the Tais market in Dili is the place to get it here

Garbage management in Dili - at least I can see way less garbage fires, here, compared to Indonesia.

Timor Leste's public buses in the cities are called microlets. You can see the "micro", I guess 😅

You can see colorful buses going around anywhere 🤩

This fruit and vegetable market is awesome! 😍

Looking down onto Dili's suburbs from the mountains to the west

Timor Leste: Dili - city impressions

1–4 jan. 2024, Oost Timor ⋅ ⛅ 28 °C

Timor Leste is the first new sovereign state of the 21st century, after fighting for independence for nearly 25 years against a cruel Indonesian occupation and suffering from a Genocide. Depending which figures you want to believe, Timor Leste lost around 20-40% of it's whole population, during that time, between 1975 and 1999.
Nowadays Timor Leste is a role-model, how peace building under UN-support can work out, as they're now living in peaceful and cooperative neighborhood with Indonesia.
Nevertheless Timor Leste is still one of the poorest countries in the world, working hard on rebuilding a functional country and self sustainable economy. Due to a lack of industrialization and a weak economy, relying now on an oil field, which will be worn out in around 8 years, the future of this country is on the edge. (Scroll down, for further information about supporting this country!)
Visiting this country and seeing, how this country is rebuilt and how this very unique successful peace building process did work out, was one of my main goals of my whole travel.
This country is very special in so many ways, these people are simply unbelievable and the vibes in this society are awesome, sometimes surprising, in good and difficult ways, always solidly united and helping each other's, full of lust for life, but still struggling with their past, but dealing with their struggles in a unique way, I couldn't imagine before.

In the area of Dili around 1/3rd of Timor Leste's inhabitants are living, so it clearly is the center of this country in any way. After New Year's Eve the city was like sleeping for 2 days, slowly woke up during the 3rd of January and went back to it's vibrant life on the 4th. It's a Christian catholic country, even if their religion has widely integrated ancient tribal beliefs and rituals.
As I've been the last 4 months in Indonesia, some comparisons will come up, even if there only the south east Asian or even oceanican roots are common with Indonesia.
I'll try to tell more about my impressions from this country and go a little bit deeper in my following postings, but for now please enjoy some impressions from my first days in Timor Leste's capital city.

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Learn about Timor Leste:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Timor

Wanna help?
https://www.unicef.org.au/donate/child-protecti…

https://bettertimor.org/Meer informatie

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