The Soko Windu is a good place to stay in Kefa at 25,000 a nite.
The guy that owns the place is an inventor of sorts that rigged up a
satellite tv set up and showed me his fish shocking rig that they use to
catch the fish in the river.
It has two probes and a few automobile condensers hooked up to a motorbike batters.
They walk through the river while one guy zaps the fish and the others collect them before they come to their senses.
Occasionally they get a big eel in the mix. Most of the fish are small but they usually get 15 kilos or so on an outing. Then he went to work on his spotlighting set up that he used in the woods to get deer. Lucky for him there are no game wardens in Timor.
The thing to remember, he says, is to only shoot at glowing eyes that
are close together otherwise you might nail one of the farmers caribou
and be in deep poop.
He says he gets one deer (rusa) a month. He has 7
kids to feed.
A couple of the police from the border came over for tea. I was
wondering about the possibility of crossing the border into Oecussi, a
part of East Timor.
My plan was to try to see if the ferry was running to Atauro and to Dili but they said it was a not possible at that time.
This was early June 2006 when there was quite a bit of tension in the
area and Indonesia decided to close the border between East and West
Timor.
Kefa is not a bad place to hang out for a while. It is easy to walk to the markets and around town.
The sidewalk is covered with red splotches from the betel nut. It is
amazing how much accumulates especially in places where folks are waiting
for the bus.
The market is ok and there are a lot of warung or food vendors along
the road selling ikan bakar (fish), pisang goreng (fried bananas),
rice, satay, babi(pig) and other goodies.
I was checking out some stew and had to step over the dog chewing on a
piece of fish in the doorway. The stew looked pretty good but then I
noticed that that wasn't a piece of fish the dog was ripping at, but
rather the jawbone of another dog complete with teeth.
I asked the lady if I could take a picture of the dog doing that but she said no. So I gave it a pass.
Sometimes you just have to pass up some bizzare photo opportunities. I
always try to get permission from the people when taking a picture.
Sometimes you loose the spontaneity of the shot but it is just the way I do things.
If they agree you can snap 5 or 6 pics and delete the ones you don't want.
In some places they love pictures and in others they are very cold to them.
There
are some fantastic villages around Kefa that you can see some beautiful
traditional homes.
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