Organic fruits and vegetables from the mountain are brought down by the farmers on vans like this one, to sell in the villages once a week. In a Timorese village in the district of Liquiçá, you can find anything from live pigs to tobacco to seaweed freshly caught off the coast.

Farmers ride down the mountain in vans like this, a trip taking about two hours one-way, to the village with their wares.

A customer interested in the dried tobacco which he will handroll into cheroots for smoking. In the foreground are mahogany-coloured avocados.

This is what it looks like brought home and washed, sliced, and sautéed with garlic, shallots, some chilli. Don’t forget the sugar and vinegar for a tangy appetizer.

It’s 7.30am in the midweek, and the market is a place to socialise and catch up on village and clan news.
Comments? The urban experience of ‘going to the market’ even in Southeast Asia today is so far removed from the source that these scenes of a preset-day village market in East Timor looks exotic even for someone like me, who used to follow my grandmother to wet markets in Singapore in the late 1970s.
Your thoughts please.
Thanks for sharing these exotic scene..
There’s more to come. Timor is an undiscovered world of contrasts. : )