In March 2024 I spent five days hiking a circuit of Atauro Island in bad weather, during the wet season. In October 2024, toward the end of the dry season, I hiked about 2/3 of the distance in another loop of the island, but in two days.

It wasn’t really a planned hike, more that I needed to spend a day in Atecru, on the west coast of Atauro Island, to help the remote community (lacking roads or mains electricity) with a funding application for solar panels and water tanks. I could have spent $160 on boats to and from Beloi, but instead spent a tough 9 hours hiking over two days.

The first day hiking from Beloi to Atecru via Arlo and Adara was the shorter and easier day on paper, but as ferries are infrequent (and was 1.5 hours late) I ended up hiking between 12.30pm and 5pm, on a route with almost no shade from the ferocious sun. Not recommended!

I took breaks whenever I could find shade, drank 8 litres of water that day, used an umbrella where the terrain would allow me to not use pools, had 3 sachets of hydrolytes and had decent break in Adara, but it was still pretty borderline and I didn’t really recover from it until the next day.

From Barry’s Place I headed up the road to Arlo which is not much fun to walk, being steep and lacking almost any shade. I almost gave up early on as the thought of spending a couple of nights in Beloi was very appealing, but I had committed to visiting Atecru.

Behind I could see the Success ferry I took. It was delayed leaving Dili as there were a number of cows from Oé-Cusse (its previous port of call) being unloaded by men with ropes…

The landscape was so dry toward the end of the dry season, not helped by the locals adopting the slash and burn habits off the Indonesians learnt during the occupation. In Australia they don’t intentionally start fires at the driest time of year for understandable reasons…

There was still a surprising amount of green in the landscape though and some views, as I took every shortcut off the road for interest, and marginally more shade.

There was welcome shade and interesting terrain on the shortcut road to Arlo.

Arlo is a very pleasant small village, where I took a quick look at the church.

I last did this walk in May 2024 and remembered the section from Arlo down to the coast as one of the most attractive and interesting, walking along a narrow path by fields. No longer! I had heard but not quite believed that they were building a road to Adara, and onto Atecru despite little desire for one from the local community.

It was a horrible (as well as ridiculously hot) experience walking along this new road. Less than 120 families in total live in Adara and Atecru so why they need an 8m wide road, with devastation seemingly even wider than this, is hard to comprehend. Timor-Leste wants to promote itself as an eco-tourism destination which is difficult to reconcile with rampant destruction like this.

I reached the end of the nightmare and made a steep descent into the compact village of Adara, home to about 50 families. I’ve spent 3 nights here before so know the place reasonably well.

It would have been nice to have stopped here but I had a final 4.5km to walk to Atecru. Thankfully it was close to low tide so I could take the coastal route which is less effort than the cliff top route. There were eye catching cliffs, boulders and rock pools.

Unfortunately despite it being close to low tide there was still one section I had to just plunge into the sea to wade 3m or so to the next dry rock. Thankfully boots dry pretty quickly in the heat here. More things of interest, including hundreds of small sea bugs crawling across the rocks away from me.

I couldn’t photograph them but there were crabs and small jumping fish in the rock pools.

It was a relief to finally arrive at my friend Jhoky’s home stay, which had noticeable new additions since my May visit.

For the detailed route and logistical information please select this hike below (click top left for the list of hikes).