RIDE WITH PIG (How we got to Lospalos) - People of East Timor (6)

Hello dear Steemians and welcome to this episode of my “People of East Timor” series!
To introduce the star of this story right away, meet our travel companion on the way from Baucau to Lospalos:

For those of you who just started reading and want to know what the heck I am talking about, feel free to check out the first few episodes to get to know Timor-Leste, its history and people. I will post the link to the first one here, if you feel like reading more, check my blog :
https://steemit.com/travel/@mrwanderlust/people-of-east-timor-dili-1

After watching a cock fight in Baucau (last episode), we went to bed early and tried to sleep in our tiny beds. The next morning, we got up early, showered using buckets with water I wouldn’t really describe as fresh or clean, and had some bananas.

Then, we had the first major problem on our journey to Jaco: How would we be able to go on making our way east? This little map shows you the way we wanted to go:

We asked a number of local people and everyone was so nice and friendly. They called their friends who were supposed to speak English, asked other people on the street and kept discussing with each other. It was moving. None of their pieces of advice was helpful though, we got more different answers than the number of people we asked…

In the end, we went to the most trustworthy building we could find: a bank. These two people did their best to understand my Indonesian and help us:

After they had figured out that we were looking for a bus to the next town called Lospalos, the girl said the most legendary sentence of the entire trip, I still can’t stop laughing about it:

“IF THE BUS COMES HERE, IT COMES BETWEEN 1PM AND 5PM.”

At first, we were a little disillusioned, but we found our good mood again pretty fast. Note how much fun the woman on the left side of the photo had laughing about us. The one in the green shirt is me, by the way, nice to meet you finally ;-).

We decided that the best thing to do would be going to the east end of the town and just trying to get picked up by passing trucks. If that wouldn’t work, there was still a chance the bus would turn up.

In about two hours of waiting, there were a few trucks and so called mircolets (some kind of tiny hop-on busses) that passed us. We asked the drivers to take us to Lospalos but they all asked for between 60 and 500 USD. It was totally ridiculous, I guess they believed western people were all billionaires.

Finally, when we started to get desperate, a yellow truck appeared and the driver offered to take us for free. Thomas climbed the truck first, turned around and said, “Guys, there is a pig in here”. And yes, he was serious as you saw in the opening picture.

We spent the way to Lospalos sitting, standing, yelling, laughing and taking pictures in the back of the truck together with some local people and the pig. The latter one soon started shitting and peeing everywhere which made the floor a little disgusting. But the palm tree leaves prevented worse, even though my backpack was dangerously close to our friend’s excrements…

On the way, we passed several tiny villages, observing the life in rural areas of East Timor.

When kids along the way saw the truck coming, they often burst into waving and yelling, running around like crazy.

I took a few of my all-time favorite shots on this bus ride, setting the shutter to 1/1000 of a second or even shorter so the images wouldn’t be blurry. I will present them in the next posts as I feel like they deserve to be presented without too much text.

So stay tuned and follow me for the next episodes with some of my most beloved photographs!

Till then, keep wandering and wondering,

Love,

mr.wonderlust