Ignacio’s Cave
A while back I managed to wangle a journalist’s ticket to Timor Leste, that tiny dot of a country at the very end of the Indonesian archipelago. Not familiar with it? — here’s a memory jogger.
It’s the country that was colonised by the Portuguese from the early 1500s onwards, then raped for its wood and marble for over 400 years while the people lived like serfs. Next it was invaded by the Indonesians, subjugated by torturing generals and eventually liberated by the UN after some 25 years of civil terror. Now things are much better; it is dirt poor but simply being exploited by Australia for its oil reserves.
The Timorese people are friendly yet independent. And the countryside is a bit like some remote parts of Africa — utterly untouched.
Our goal after leaving the capital, Dili, was to travel as far east as possible to the fabled Valu Beach with its immaculate sand and pristine corals. Valu is a bit like the one in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach; hard to reach, gobsmackingly lovely, and a bit scary because it is so remote.
The drive there was challenging, even in a 4WD. The road varied from smooth tarmac near Dili (thanks China) to rut-strewn canyons slithering down the side of a mountain. Once past the outskirts of Dili, huge brooding mountains, massive river deltas, deserted beaches and breathtakingly precipitous eucalypt-scattered cliffs all slipped by our car windows by as we twisted and turned away from civilisation along tracks pitted with ruts and potholes.
The country is so poor there were only a few sparsely populated hamlets to pass through— just a couple of children ploughing, and the occasional hut selling drinks. Scattered palm-thatch huts and a few scratching chickens offered evidence that some people do live there; otherwise it was like driving through a video game with no other contestants.
We battered, clattered and lurched to Baucau, some 130km away. It took us four hours and that wasn’t including the stop at the optimistically described ‘service station’ on the way; the one with the heavy calibre bullet holes through the wall of the toilets. Thanks Indonesia.
At Baucau, we stopped and ate. It was charmingly run-down; once it was a major centre for Portuguese regional administration but now is simply a crumbling way-stop and market town for local villagers. Afterwards, we headed into even more isolated country, towards Tutuala, an old seaside station for the Portuguese colonial masters. The situation was spectacular; perched vertiginously on top of a cliff waiting patiently for love, restoration, attention and tourists. But it was derelict and empty, the only life was a listless child or two, troops of chattering monkeys and a cruising sea eagle wheeling and gliding over the glittering water of the Timor Sea.
From Tutuala it was a stone’s throw down to Valu Beach where we rolled out of dense jungle onto some of the whitest, finest sand anywhere on the planet. There were a few fishermen in a group, smoking, otherwise it was deserted. This empty, utterly silent stretch of sand lay like a silk ribbon as the sea lapped over corals so close we could reach out and touch them. Incredible, and incredibly beautiful, we all agreed. But our guides had more to offer than just boring old deserted beaches, talcum-fine sand, crystal-clear water and living corals right there to prod. They had history.
“Would you like to see some old paintings?” asked Andi, our guide. Yes, we said, expecting some frescos inside crumbling ruins left by the Portuguese. “OK,” she responded. “It’s a bit of a walk, and the jungle is quite thick so if you aren’t feeling fit maybe it’s not for you.” We all agreed that we were very fit, and could cope with any walk they could throw at us.
Three quarters of an hour later, dripping with sweat and bleeding lightly from multi-scratched legs and arms courtesy of the dense vegetation, we turned a sharp corner round a pillar of rock. The trek had seen us wade through a wall of green, chirping, dripping, chirruping, grabbing, jabbing and apparently endless vegetation. We barged through fragrant wild coffee bushes, a legacy of the Portuguese. We brushed past staggeringly beautiful and fragrant frangipanis and less-fragrant urine splashed trees, a sure sign of wild civet cats.
We snatched occasional glimpses of distant blue ocean through the undergrowth as we climbed and sweated, but had not the slightest clue where we were or where we were going. Then, as we scrambled round the rocky corner, over a staircase of ancient roots, we all gave one of those theatrical gasps, in unison.
We had popped out of the jungle onto a massive limestone rock face, a hundreds metres or so above the beach. An impossibly blue sea stretched out as far as the horizon, a soft breeze blew our sweat away and we could see dot-sized fishermen crawling up the beach far below. We swooned. Swifts darted up and down the rock face, vanishing into holes in the rock. Massive bees bumbled in and out of cracks. The sea whispered and kissed the beach way below our feet. We just stood and looked, and felt the ancient power of all that nature and beauty there just for us, at that moment.
“If you look up, just here, you can see one of the paintings,” said Andi. We had forgotten completely about the original objective of the trip — it had been blown away by the astonishing loveliness of the place we had arrived at. But when we looked, our astonishment notched up a level. Just above our heads were four little stick men carrying axes, etched in ochre on the face of the cliff. We weren’t experts, but they looked old, very old.
“The age of these drawings is a bit hard to tell, but excavations at the next cave down from here, Lene Hara, have found artefacts up to 30,000–35,000 years old,” said Andi. That’s definitely really, really old.
The massive limestone cliff face stretching hundreds of metres above us was covered with endless gouges, lumps, bumps, colours, ridges, light splashes and crevices all hollowed out by millions of years of dripping water. The face was honeycombed with caves, crevasses and frozen multi-coloured waterfalls of ancient limestone. And dozens of those lumps and bumps and gouges had been drawn on, painted, marked over thousands of years. We felt humbled, astonished, and privileged all at one go.
Then, materialising out of nowhere, a stocky man wearing a t-shirt, shorts, a smile and a razor-sharp machete rocked up and asked us if we needed help. He told us his name was Ignacio.
“Because I am here, at Ile Kére Kére cave, the paintings will show themselves to you,” he explained. “If I was not here, the paintings would not appear when you look.” He helped make them appear by throwing water over them from a plastic bottle — not exactly mainstream archaeological practice but it certainly worked. The colours came alive and the paintings vibrated in the afternoon heat. We clambered over the rocks, discovering more and more scratched and painted designs. We gasped at their mystery. Who did them? Why? And how come they were still there, so well preserved after all this time?
“Because nobody comes here,” said Ignacio. “It’s too hard to get to.” Andi agreed, saying a few hundred foreigners at most had probably seen the paintings before us, since they had first been reported to the outside world in the 1960s.
Ignacio jumped from rock to cave to overhang, pointing out black and ochre people, animals, fish, boats, turtles, geometric designs and more, all painted on the bare limestone rock face.
“It is my job to make sure the paintings are given respect,” he said. “Every year all the people in my family come together to respect them, to make offerings to the pictures.”
It’s a tradition that the local Fataluku people have been keeping for as many years as they can remember. Perhaps thousands of years. Or tens of thousands. It’s sobering to realise that some of the figures , and the traditions that support them, could go as far back as just after the last Ice Age. Gulp.
Exhausted not by the climb but by clambering about looking for paintings and taking photos of them in the cloying equatorial humidity, we slowly got ready to leave. The wind had dropped, and the only sound now was a curious plopping. It was honey dripping from massive bee honeycombs in the rock, heated by the humid air and dripping long dark tendrils of sticky sweetness down the face of the rock.
As we left we noticed a newly carved wooden lingam standing near some of the more prominent paintings. It was surrounded by small offerings like food, cigarettes and flowers; presumably put there by Fataluku people that we never saw, nor were likely to see. Local animist traditions and beliefs are still very much alive at Ile Kére Kére.
We plodded back down the jungle path to the beach, though the vibrant and steaming jungle to a gob-smacking sunset that was pushed aside by the full moon rising gently over that incredible white sand beach. With memories of the ancient Kére Kére paintings still banging around gloriously inside my head I realised that sometimes, being a journalist ain’t a bad gig.
