Since the freedom of Timor Leste, the influx of foreigners
to Timor Leste is quite substantial. Let’s remember the range of missions at
the time until now, such as UNAMET – UNTAET until to the current, and hopefully
will be the last mission - UNMIT in December this year. Those missions employed
thousands of employees, and had poured millions of dollar that sprayed as well to
local economy in Timor Leste generally and DILI particularly. Presence of those
people from the mission has fostered tourism activities. Foreign business Men
built hotels, restaurants, resorts, apartment and all those related services
that foreigners could use and pay.
To take advantage of those missions, locals have created
sort of initiative to sell goods, create small yard of recreational areas and some
other small businesses. The beginning of the foreigners' flock is a capstone in
the tourism development. That is because the culture of traveling they carry with them. To respond this culture ,there is a need for a complementary effort. One is locals have started the businesses, whereas government
is demanded to facilitate this start by creating everything needed so that locals can
keep attracting foreign tourists despite UN mission is going to end.
Stakeholder of government says, number of tourists visiting
Timor Leste is increasing, so we need to build facilities for that. Yet, I don’t
find any source mentioning whether the rise of tourist is a flock of people that
attracted by specific places, events in Timor Leste (DILI), or the rise is just a
coincidence of the UN’s missions?. We want a more sustainable development in
the tourism sector, not like today’s trend is BUILD today and ABANDON tomorrow.
If you are noticed by the northern coast piecemeal tourism development, from Dili to
eastern – Dili to western, there is a new view which small houses were lined up in some spots. From these
new views, particularly from Dili to Lospalos, you would think that stakeholder from government
has done a lot of things to facilitate the sector moving ahead.
But, I don’t really understand how those projects were
planned. Eventually, projects never give a good signal of improvement
compare to the original from 1999 as far as I observed in many places in
average. Forget in DILI and let’s see picture below here, “a small roof is
housing a group of teenagers in BEHAU”. The place is called one dollar beach
according to the locals around I asked. I still remember how crowd this place
was. In the past, I could see predominantly white people were there to swim and dry the body
up from the heat. It used to be no such small roof but it was very crowd, vice
versa things are made available but useless.
Since this small roofed house is started to built up, I
regularly give an eye, and think shortly about the progress of this project when I
travel to my hometown. The project has been taking time like a major project,
no finishing until now. Vivid result, it is temporarily no longer used by its planned users, travelers from Dili to eastern districts utilize the place for resting area instead.
They tend to even destroy the facility by throwing trash everywhere. Another horrible view is that goats are also using the place as resting area.
Project of building those roofed tents does not even improve the place. The way I look this picture is what I saw in Dili, where
location for fish market is abandoned, traditional market is abandoned so on
and so forth. Again BUILD today – ABANDON tomorrow.
When UN withdraws, who will be housed under this small roofed tents?. It's a big question mark anyway. I meant since we do not have substantial number of tourists to visit those recreational places which are located far away from the capital (Dili), we should think wisely of spending money. A good example of this is, I told before, like aforementioned project. There is no urgency to build this kind of infrastructure or any related facilities. We will develop every place we think potential for tourists. But it needs demand. When there is a demand - there is a supply. We have to adopt this simple theory in order to become cost effective builders. Otherwise the more money we spend there more blur the result will be.
Hope this gives you an inspiration
