Oecusse, By Way of Elsewhere

At Dili the gate is not really a gate. It is a shaded veranda where the air smells of jet fuel and frangipani, and the propellers of the small ATR are already turning though no one has called us to board.

I am waiting for the flight to Oecusse. It is a thirty-five minute flight to a place you can also drive to, if you have a full day and the right stamps.

Someone online had asked, simply enough, how to get from Dili to Oecusse. It is the kind of question that sounds logistical and is in fact philosophical.

Oecusse is Timor-Leste, but not contiguous with it. It sits alone on the north coast of the island of Timor, entirely surrounded by Indonesian West Timor. To get there overland you must leave your own country, enter another, and then re-enter your own. Your passport will show you departing and arriving in the same nation, with another country in between.

There are three ways, which is two more ways than such a place should reasonably require. You can fly, as I am doing. You can take the ferry, twelve hours, twice a week, if the sea allows. Or you can take the bus that threads west from Dili into Indonesia at Mota'ain, across West Timor, and back into Timor-Leste at Sakato. The bus has to pause for borders that do not, strictly speaking, concern it.

Exclaves have always made maps look nervous. Alaska, Kaliningrad, Cabinda, Ceuta. They are the footnotes cartographers hope you will not ask about. They exist because history stopped mid-sentence and left a word on the wrong side of the period.

Oecusse exists because the Portuguese stayed there when the Dutch took the rest of western Timor. It was where the sandalwood traders landed, where the first priests came ashore. Long after the island was divided, Oecusse remained Portuguese, then Indonesian-occupied, then Timorese again. A small coast with its own memory of belonging.

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In the waiting area, a woman holds a box of cakes on her lap, tied with string. Two men in pressed shirts carry identical briefcases. We are all, in this small way, commuting within a country that requires us to leave it.

That is the strange work the question was really asking about. Not timetables. But how a state holds onto a piece of itself at a distance. How people learn to live with a border inside their domestic travel.

Most travel is predicated on moving from one country to another. Travel to an exclave reverses the premise. You move from one country to the same country, and another country happens in the middle. You are asked to show your documents to return to where you already are.

I thought about how often we do this in smaller ways. How we leave ourselves to get back to ourselves. The detour that is not a detour at all but the only road.

They called the flight. Not over a speaker, but by a man who lifted his hand.

We walked out onto the tarmac. The heat came up off the concrete in visible waves. The plane was smaller than it had looked from the veranda.

From seat 5A, Dili slipped away quickly. The runway, the port, the Cristo Rei statue with its back to the sea. Then water, bright and shallow over the reef, then deeper water. For a little while we were over nothing that belonged to anyone. Then the island again, brown hills, a different stretch of the same coast.

We had not left Timor-Leste, except that for a few minutes, we had.