Here are some group emails that I prepared earlier, without knowing how to use a semi-colon ;;;

SEPT '09:

A couple of years ago, my Tetun translator Ina and some friends decided to go on a trip to the mountains.

While tackling a particularly brisk incline, one of her friends collapsed. Turns out she had a heart condition she hadn’t told anyone about. She died. Right there on the mountain. She was 37.

Needless to say, this had a decisively negative impact on the rest of their itinerary. So instead of enjoying the sights, Ina found herself tasked with going through her friend’s former room (or former friend’s room?) to get her stuff before they left. Finding that many of her friend’s clothes were dirty, Ina did what any Ina would do: she burnt the lot.

The moral of her story was pretty straightforward.

“Always take clean clothes when you travel,” she told me minutes into our trip to Baucau this week.

What, so if you die unexpectedly it makes it easier to clean up after you?

“Yes,” she said, eyeing my shirt.

Ina is one cool cat. Conceding only that she is “above 30” years old, she seems to have already seen it all many many times over, and remains decidedly underwhelmed by it.

Take the Flamboyant Hotel in Baucau. This is one of the oldest hotels in Timor, and is considered the best place to stay in the whole country. The pink building dates from the Portuguese occupation, survived the Indonesian firestorm, and today stands dripping with bougainvillea and ringed by water features. It even has a family of monkeys on staff.

It’s actually called Pousada de Baucau, but to Ina it will always be The Flamboyant Hotel, or just “Flamboyant” once she knows I’m keeping up with her. To her it smacks of all that is wrong with a new coat of paint and too many steps.

“Last time we stayed in the Flamboyant,” she sniffs. “I don’t like the Portuguese food there. It’s too oily.”

Thanks to my new friend Murat from UNPOL, Ina and I found a happy medium for our digs in Baucau, which was beautiful. The lush old town overlooking the sea is overrun with aqueducts funnelling water so clean you’d swear you could read the cigarette health warnings off the LA Lights packets lying on the bottom. Well, if the packs had health
warnings, that is.

The overnight trip was ostensibly about going to see the media centre up there and then on to meet the paper’s correspondent. He’s a dude who has scrawled “FUCK OOF” in big letters across the side of his house, and that kinda set the tone for our meeting.

He was nice enough; just not really that into inverted pyramids, prisms, or anything else I was selling that wasn’t a new dictaphone. Fair enough, really. This was, after all, the former guerrilla who had just handed the paper the scoop of the century.

For those of you who missed it, the Catholic Church in Baucau has found a cure for AIDS.

SEPT '09:

I have discovered that I possess, most innately, what it takes to become a good teacher.

They’re called breasts, and they’re a key element to maintaining attention when explaining the value of the inverted pyramid news structure to my Timorese colleagues.

I’m writing this now in Unlit Room Number Two, because there’s only so much theory you can run past reporters before coming across as, well, a training editor. It’s interesting to note that journalists write, fold, and then distribute their own papers here. I casually told them that in Sydney we have to fill out our own timesheets as well. It was
a moment of transnational solidarity.

In my brief role as training person, I have built on some of the very hard work done by Monica by explaining the concepts of rounds and outlining the structure of the newsroom. Examples of which are as follows:

Publisher: Often detested by staff;
Chief of Staff: Responsible for telling journalists the desk is not interested in any of their stories this week, but could they quickly knock out a brief from this press release? Cheers;
Senior reporter: The person whose byline runs first;
Interns: Important during a hiring freeze, see also “general reporter”.

Jose Belo, the director here and stringer for SBS and the ABC is a bit of a gun, but he’s not around much. He basically comes in at the start of each week and hands out half a dozen confidential government documents showing corruption, before asking the two reporters to follow them up and heading out.

Belo also hates the body that has just been given $1.8 million over five years to improve Timor’s journalism. I went and visited them today in their air-conditioned, wifi office and they were very nice. For this and other reasons they have more than two journalists to whom we can repeatedly point out the merits of the inverted pyramid structure. Even if next time it was be done in a bikini or wet t-shirt.

The wind beneath my wings this week has been a translator called Ina, who often looks at me in silent reproach or expresses wonderment at why anyone would choose to become a journalist. I tell her it’s because in Australia we’re given free parking. Swap “reproach” for “yourbullshittingme-ness” and you pretty much see how this one goes
down. She could have a bright future.

Otherwise, Dili has been good. You get to know most expats around here pretty quickly. Evenings have been spent going to the beaches that are so coral-strewn it’s like swimming in a Gold Coast gift shop, or heading to someone’s farewell party to drink their alcohol.

Tonight, before heading off to Baucau tomorrow, I’m seeing a Man About a Rabid Dog for one of my own stories. I’d mention that it’s about something in Timor, but why ruin the punchline.

SEPT '09:

Greetings from East Timor, where the mosquitoes are social, and the dollars American.

It's really bloody hot here. The beaches are amazing and the infrastructure pretty under-developed. The office where I'm working is basically three rooms in the 'burbs made entirely of concrete, with no lighting and half a computer. I stopped in and said hello on Friday.

But seeing as it's the weekend, I've spent most of my time getting to know - and then making fun of - the expat NGO/UN social scene with a couple of parties and a day out to the Island north of Dili. Building on established occupier traditions of the Spanish, the French, and the Indonesians, these are the people who introduce each other as acronyms and know the Timorese as the people who clean their houses. So far I've discovered they have parties pretty much every night – when there’s no reason, they make one up. As the alcohol is usually free, I try not to be too scathing about their apparent definition of sustainable development as a grant with a generous expense account, or how they mix a cocktail.

The most fantastic addition to the expat UN crowd (who refer to themselves as "internationals") is the Portugese police. When these guys arrive at a party they tend to alter the atmosphere like a clandestine fart: they're not referred to directly but everyone seems to find their presence quietly confronting - more so because it bothers them much less than they’d care to admit. These guys are basically a bunch of identical frankentorsos who glisten and jog shirtless (in packs) up to Timor’s other icon, the statue of Jesus Christ, every afternoon. It’s hard to believe they’re not just a figment of collective imagination, but I’m assured there have been enough independently verified accounts of people sleeping with them to confirm every single one of them actually exists a few times over.

They're not allowed out after 11pm anymore, however, after a shooting incident at a bar a couple of weeks ago. More's the pity.

The counterinsurgents of sorts in the battle to make the world a better place tend to be journo types. They tend to have scruffier jaws and less refined drinking habits. They’re at the popular bar a day too early. They have bad facial hair and mumble. It’s my theory that these people tend fall at the periphery of the social set because they are
yet to grasp that success in this field can be partially attributed to colourful shirts. Given what I’ve been up to the past couple of days, it’s fair to assume that I haven’t actually met many.

On to other stereotypes, the Timorese people I’ve met are absolutely lovely. Shorter than me, as a rule. They also tend to have strangely positive affirmations on their t-shirts. “Say No To Drugs” and “I Love My Body” made a showing in the first couple of hours. “No Bullets, No Bitches”, a bit later.

There are about seven tourists in the country, defined as anyone staying for less than a month for any reason. I met them in my first few hours here at the Jesus statue amid jogging Portugese visions. The main front here is a group from Albury Wadonga studying eco tourism and they're quite a friendly bunch. It seems places considered out of
the way and poorly serviced by regional air carriers have somewhat of an affinity for each other.

On to other impressions of Dili, taxis here at night make changeover in Kings Cross seem like the Silk Road rush hour. You won’t find a taxi on the road after 8pm, and there’s a fair chance that those that are doing the rounds wouldn’t mind knowing what your intestines look like. Lucky for me that I’ve had access to one of the UN-like peace
tanks known as a Mitsubishi Pagero through Lucy, who has been wonderful.

The president also lives next to the supermarket. If I were running that business, I'd put that on a logo or something.

Anyway, this is probably all too long, but I don’t have a Twitter feed.

MAY '07:

Being stupid and dozy in a Sichuan teahouse feels much like falling asleep inside a Monet painting. I spent my morning progressively melting into my chair and the view of lilly pond...If someone hadn't interruped everything to try and sell me a massage I think by now I would have been framed and for sale in a giftshop somewhere.

In any case, welcome to Chengdu: my six-hour-old city.

You'll have to excuse the poetics. I have spent two days and two nights on a train travelling overland from Lhasa, which I think has sent me a bit mental. Patrick White for one couldn't take the trip - 'The Eye of the Storm" broke up quite literally somewhere between chapter seven, chapter nine and the watercooler between two of the carriages.

The high point of the journey passed us on Thursday night when we reached 5100m, causing some of my less sturdy carriage companions to get nose bleeds. In parts the track run over permafrost, meaning the rails have to be kept permanently refrigerated or the single line in and out will buckle. When the Chinese built the line about a year ago they first called in experts from Switzerland who said the task would be imposssible. The Swiss may have factored in the mountains, the altitude and the frost, but they hadn't reckoned with Sino pride and flexible labour laws; the Chinese built the line anyway, and Lhasa has been becoming more of a tourist trap ever since.

But Tibet was great, I didn't want to leave. A couple of friends and I spent our last night sneaking into a Tibetan school to play a game of basketball at 3700m. I'm pretty sure I will be the only one who has done any sort of altitude training when Broadmeadow's Women's Division 2 meets in the coming weeks. For this reason, along with my diet of rice and MSG, I anticipate a stunning return to form.

In a nutshell, I spent a couple of days travelling to Tibet's highest salt lake, Namtso, disputably the highest in the world, and out to Gamden, a monastery on the top of a mountain, which was being rebuilt after it was pretty much destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The monastery was really cool; a couple of friends and I hitched a ride with a busload of Tibetan pilgrims, who sung the whole way there up a pretty dodgy cliffside road and did the kora round the ridge of the mountain.

But now it's all Chengdu and pandas and teahouses and backpackers with their cheapfuck eyes. I had wondered where they had all gone, but it turns out they had been hanging around a converted printing house hostel down an alleyway, a block or two from the People's Park. But hey - I'm here for the pandas.

MAY '07:

I have found the place where pollution was invented. It is called Datong, a city where the wounded screams of mother nature are drowned out by car horns and megaphones. I'm in the heart of China's coal country, and despite my expectations it is nothing like the coalmines of the Hunter Valley, where workers still take time out to crack a nice local wine and talk about any OH and S issues.

If something doesn't smell like soot here, it's because it smells like petrol. Your eyes and nose sting all the time, and I have developed a bit of a smokers chuckle. I arrived last night by train and it felt vaguely like I had booked a one-way ticket into the Great Leap Forward. No one speaks English, which is fine, considering it's China, and everyone else except me is Chinese, which again, is fine, considering it's China.

I seriously didn't think I would get out of here (remember it's a public holiday, all the very crowded trains are booked) until I was rescued by a 22-year-old French countess who speaks fluent Mandarin. I now have an overnight hard seat ticket to the tourist trap of Pingyao, which should be cool. To repay her I had to be her chaperone last night and today as she fought off the unwanted advances of a Chinese financial engineer who followed her all the way from Beijing. We went to dinner at a local restaurant - he staring deeply into her eyes while I finished off the beer. Laughing in the face of danger and smartraveller.gov.au, I even tried the cold pork.

Why did I come here, you ask? Just outside of the city there are more than 1000 buddhas carved into the side of a cliff (and directly opposite a coal mine, which is ringed by apartment buildings) and a monastery that is somehow perched on the side of a mountain, and has remained just so for about 1000 years. Both were pretty amazing. The countess and I speculated as to why the founders of Taoism decided to build the monastery halfway up a vertical incline rather than the very comfortable-looking valley below. I guess the Chinese invented "let's just have a crack at it" along with noodles and gunpowder.

Yeah. My train doesn't come until 11pm, by which point the wind will have picked up and it will have gotten quite cold. I might see if one of my colleagues here at the Internet cafe will let me play Warcraft with them, or, failing that, huddle in a corner in the train station and think about a few of my favourite things while rocking slowly back and forth. It's fine, I'll buy a lump of coal to keep me warm.

MAY '07:

Sometimes it's the choice of transport that can make or break a trip. Scott of the Antarctic had his ponies, and today Leesha in Beijing had her bicycle. It was meant to be a leisurely cycle through the gable-roofed hutong (courtyard houses) district that I have been staying in, meandering gently down to Tiannamen Square, but I got a bit lost. I went off the Lonely Planet map of "Greater Beijing" (which is crap and out of date btw) not once but twice - first in the
southerly direction, and then the north-easterly direction, which is quite impressive I think considering I thought I was going west.

I stopped and asked five people for directions, which consisted of a "ni hao" followed by a waving of the (aforementioned completely crap) map in an effort to get back on track. Two of the people I asked were cab drivers who refused to give me and my filthy bike a ride, but were kind enough to point. One cab driver did finally find it in his heart to leave my rental bike hanging halfway out of the boot while driving me back to the hutong...blowing me kisses and trying to touch my knee the whole way. The whole ordeal took about four hours, but I did see a lot of Beijing.

Since then I have discovered the answer to world peace and inner contentment is a couple of beers with some people from your dorm and an hour-long foot massage (for the princely sum of $6).

But I digress. The rest of the day was spent at the silk markets looking at really tacky Mao trinkets and then heading over to Tiannamen Square. The China Daily reported that 1000 people were reported lost in the square on Tuesday alone, and still the beast that is the May Day public holiday rolls on. Despite the chaos, and difficulty securing a train ticket, the government is apparently happy that a reported 1.6 billion have looked upon this time as an opportunity to travel. That figure sounds a bit high to me, but how can you not trust a newspaper that puts an exclamation mark at the end its lead sentence? It's all so exciting.

The wall yesterday was good, but pretty heavy going. Because the section I did required some degree of fitness and a lack of any heart condition, it was not as busy as it could have been... if you excuse the American computer technicians trying to find themselves. It's also pretty hard to complain about an incline when a 90-year-old Chinese woman is keeping pace while trying to sell you a guide book, or fret about a narrow walkway and a sharp drop when a two-year-old appears to be taking it all on board two metres ahead of you.

But yeah. Tomorrow I leave Beijing for Da Tong and its hanging monastery, cave carvings, and depressing industrial infrastructure It's about 1mm from Beijing on the LP map, but will take close to half a day to get there. It's a pretty big country.