Jesus was 27 metres tall and elevated 100 metres on a chunk of sea-licked headland, his arms outstretched towards Dili as though offering the devoutly Catholic capital a big, celestial hug. “Come to me”, he was saying...

I suspect the reply was “No deal”: he wore more graffiti than a Brixton railway siding.

The towering icon was a gift to the Timorese from their previous overlords, the Indonesian government. Between the Indonesian invasion of Timor in 1975 and the UN’s negotiation of peace and independence in 1999, one-third of this country’s population of 750,000 is said to have disappeared.

When I heard East Timor was being spoken of as “the new Thailand”, I was incredulous. Timor? Timor-Leste, the world’s newest country, only formally independent from Indonesia since 2002? The Timor made famous by news footage of machete-wielding mobs? Apparently so. Tony Wheeler, Lonely Planet entrepreneur and traffic marshal to the world’s backpackers, loved the place so much, he authored the new Timor guidebook.

From the shadow of Christ’s bronze robe, sheltering from the scorching sun, Dili looked like a poor man’s Papeete, a Rio writ tiny. A haze of smoke from cooking fires hung over tin roofs corroded red by the semi-tropical climate; there was a presidential palace, a large floating hotel, and remnants of 400 years of relatively benign Portuguese dominion — a few colonnaded villas in lurid colours, grandee mansions, a garrison built in 1627. And, of course, Catholic churches.

I went down from the mount and walked the 5km-long waterfront. It was busy in a small sort of way, the wharf attended by container ships, the waters dotted with dugout canoes. Outside the presidential palace, people sat under huge banyan trees selling fish, fruit and Indonesian sweets.

Most Timorese get by on US$1 a day, so catering to tourists (especially ones who don’t speak their kitchen dialect of Indonesian and Portuguese) isn’t high on their agenda. I tried to fill in some of the gaps at the Xanana Reading Room, a converted house where Timorese can learn about their new country, then went on to Arte Moris, the old National Museum, now a cultural centre and artists’ community of a couple of dozen students. A Swiss woman, Gabriela Gansser, runs the place: “It’s very therapeutic for the students,” she said, “especially after what many of them have seen. Some will never be artists. But something else will come out.”

Foreign workers — UN staff, NGOs and company people — keep Arte Moris alive by buying the artworks. They also patronise a vibrant market selling tais — locally woven bolts of cloth — and they’ve spawned a modest bar, hotel and restaurant scene by paying New York prices for whatever off-duty comforts they can get hold of.

At the end of most days, I visited the Caz Bar at the back of White Sands beach, where I bought $5 beers and sat among people from Europe, Japan, South America and the United States. Cristo Rei stood a kilometre away, and I often wondered if he might one day be modelled into Dili souvenirs. For now, however, the aptest Dili knick-knack would be a model Land Rover with “UN” painted on its doors.

()THE FEW tour operators working out of Dili believe their fortunes lie in the coast road running from Dili to Tutuala. They’re probably right — it’s an incredible drive.

I hired a 4WD and made the 250km journey, one that felt perilously close to a voyage of discovery. The road runs past steep hillsides veiled with eucalypts, crumbling Portuguese forts, fishing villages where locals sit dividing the day’s catch, stolid white churches rising out of humble communities, and rice terraces descending from mountain foothills to rocky coves and coral white sands. At Baucau, a town sitting in a steep amphitheatre of limestone, I walked a rough track winding down to the sea, following a magical spring that spilt like salt. At its end, I found fabulous beaches, but only one was occupied — by an old woman tending goats.

At the eastern end of the country, the road — never good — turned God-awful. It bucked and jolted me into remote high country where fingers of cloud trailed through the forests. It was here that I saw my first “spirit houses” — huts on stilts with elongated thatches and crowns of shell — and eerie animist cemeteries. These were Catholic grave sites, but the tombs of village chiefs were decorated with horned buffalo skulls. They seemed shamanic and powerful and I spent hours walking among them, feeling I was nowhere I’d ever seen or heard of.

The other tourist mecca-in-waiting — so the expats had assured me — was Maubisse, a two-hour drive south of Dili. The road rose nearly 1,000 metres in just 10km, a very sudden respite from the humidity of Dili. As quickly as the capital fell away, so mists began blowing across the narrow road, huge fir forests crowded round and shawl-wrapped people appeared ghost-like in the landscape.

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