Continued from yesterday”¦ We were greeted by the village queen, Kolo Binu, and two of her granddaughters, all beautiful women with big smiles. A couple of the men also eventually came out to welcome us. We presented our gift and, like in the other village, it was put in a basket and passed around. We were served coffee and fried bananas, which are basically banana chips that aren’t quite as crispy as we are used to. It was 16:00 (4:00 pm). Neither of us particularly wanted the coffee. Eric does not like coffee and Christi is sensitive to caffeine and didn’t think she would be able to sleep with caffeine so late in the day. However, we decided it was important to not offend our host. Much to Eric’s surprise, the coffee was delicious. So good, in fact, that he had a second cup, which floored Christi. They must brew it differently than we do because there was zero bitterness to it at all. As we were enjoying our coffee on the patio of the main house, it was pointed out to us that we were sitting right in front of the coffee plant that the beans were picked from. How cool is that? Three feet from plant to cup. Wow.

Of all the villages on Timor, Boti is the Continue reading →

Ony and the driver, Anish, picked us up at the beach near Kosmos at 08:00. Normally he does three day trips into the mountains, but we were uncomfortable being away from Kosmos for more than one night, so we opted for the shortened two day version.

We followed the coast for a few kilometers, seeing many of the same sights as we had seen on our bemo ride yesterday. We turned and headed up the mountain. As we moved farther out of town, the buildings became less dense and there were small pockets of farmland here and there. Ony commented that we were lucky we had come at the beginning of rainy season, when it was green. The trees and bigger bushes were green, but the ground cover and smaller shrubs were dead, and it seemed brown and dusty to us. The flowers have all started to bloom, so there were lots of colorful flowers to see. Also, there were an amazing amount of butterflies flitting about. Despite being dry, it was still a pretty drive.

The east bound road went back down the mountain into a valley. Our first stop was to see a couple of musicians, Jitron K. Pah and his son. They are actually pretty famous within Indonesia, even playing for the president. They play the sasandu instrument professionally. The sasandu itself is a cylinder with strings all the way around it. The number of strings varies from 25 to 43, depending on the size of the piece. There is a woven basket around the backside. In addition to playing, they also hand craft the instruments and sell them out of their home. We were surprised by how beautiful the sansadu sounds. Almost like a cross between traditional Japanese string music, a harp and a guitar. The dad played Indonesian folk songs for us and the son played western pop tunes. We wanted to buy CD’s, but they were out. Here is a shot of son playing and dad singing.

Near the musicians’ home, we noticed Continue reading →