Ausstralian turns RI barracks into guest house

Ausstralian turns RI barracks into guest house

By Frederik Balfour

DILI, East Timor (AFP): Less than 48 hours after the last Indonesian troops slipped away from East Timor, an Australian car salesman has turned a deserted military barracks into an unusual bed and breakfast.

The rooms look out over a former ammunitions dump and the bathrooms are a long walk from the bedrooms, but the Dili Lodge Hotel is open for business.

The furnishings are spartan -- the rooms are housed in the kind of temporary steel huts seen at construction sites which were brought in from Australia on barges.

Hospital-style beds are crammed into quarters not much larger than steerage class on the Titanic, but they have air conditioning and a minibar.

Wayne Thomas also points out as he bounces up and down on a bed that the rooms have "good quality mattresses, not the cheap junk".

At present he is catering mainly to expatriate businessmen, multilateral agencies and non-governmental organizations, but Thomas is confident the tourist trade will pick over the next two years once word gets out that Dili is safe.

"Its probably going to become a small Bali or Lombok style place. I can really see it taking off," said Thomas, referring to the popular nearby Indonesian holiday islands.

At present his establishment has about as much charm as a trailer park and a room costs around US$70 per night. But he takes exception to being called a carpet-bagger.

"I think that what we are doing is a badly-needed thing in town," he said.

"We have a return on shareholder investment but I don't think at the end of the day its a rip-off situation."

For now, his establishment is the only spot offering accommodation in a town that lies in ruins, and where hot running water is an untold luxury.

As the city slowly pieces itself back together after the massacres and devastation wrought by Indonesian soldiers and pro- Jakarta militias in September, Thomas plans to have 300 rooms ready in two weeks.

And he sees nothing ironic in leasing the land from prominent independence leader Manuel Carrascalao, who owned the property before the Indonesians invaded East Timor in 1975 and whose own house lies in ruins.

"He's a bit like the lord mayor, everybody knows him," said Thomas, saying he pays Carrascalao rent similar to what he would pay at home in the northern Australian city of Darwin and provides him with a free room.

"He does some consultative work for me and advises me on how to treat the locals," said 56-year-old Thomas.

Thomas concocted the idea of the Dili Lodge through his car dealership in Darwin. Humanitarian groups were buying so many cars for use in Dili that he needed to offer them after-sales service.

"We had trouble finding premises for a workshop and then I realized I had got the cart before the horse. We needed to find accommodation first."

That was a little over two weeks ago -- now a couple of shiny new Mitsubishi cars with "For Sale or Rent" signs are parked in front of the "hotel".

By the end of this week he expects to have delivered five new vehicles, all to local East Timorese.

Setting up a business has been made easy by the fact that until the UN Transitional Authority for East Timor (UNTAET) was set up on October 26, East Timor had no local authority.

There are no taxes, and Thomas even gets his power for free.