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.