A massive statue of Christ looks out to sea from the headland at the eastern end of the bay where the East Timor capital of Dili is situated. Styled after Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer, it was erected by the government of Indonesia after it seized the former Portuguese colony in 1975.
The concrete sculpture can be reached by climbing past 14 stations of the cross built into the hillside, a stiff penance in the baking sun. At the top there is a breath-taking view of the interior mountains where clouds build up to form late afternoon thunderstorms. But I found it completely deserted, apart from a man asleep at the last station of the cross.
The Catholic people of East Timor don't think much of this "gift" from Jakarta. The government pointedly made the figure 27 metres high, to symbolise the 27 provinces of Indonesia (including East Timor). They prefer to pray at the statue to the Blessed Virgin in a tiny seafront park outside the house of the Nobel laureate, Bishop Carlos Belo.
The intense religious devotion of the East Timor people can be seen on Sunday at 7 a.m. mass in Dili Cathedral, a large modern church with a clock tower on which the hands have stopped permanently at midday (or midnight?). The two-hour service is attended mainly by devout men who fill pew after pew, and without exception line up to take communion. The women and children go to later masses.
The East Timorese have a reputation for friendliness to strangers and the children are particularly open and affectionate. "Hello mister," they shout to a stranger walking round the town.
"Obrigado," I said after I took a picture of a little group of giggling children. "De nada," they chorused, using one of the Portuguese words mixed in with Tetum, the East Timorese lingua franca.
Even the Sumatran police chief, Mr Hulman Gulton, has succumbed to their charm. "I love these people like my own family," he told me. However, behind the smiles there is sadness. Many of the children and young people have lost parents and relatives at the hands of the Indonesian military.
Some 200,000 people, a quarter of the population, died from repression and famine after annexation. This was the subject of a poem written by jailed Resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, called Generations, in which he recalled the "Hearts stabbed / with memories / of the tears of children / shed for their parents".
"Every family has someone killed or bashed by the soldiers," said an Australian nun working with the children. Prospects for the young are bleak. Few can ever hope to leave Dili, an underdeveloped town with only three flights in and out every week to Jakarta - a cockroach-infested Fokker 100 of Merpati airlines which uses an unfenced runway beside which children play, or a daily commuter plane to Denpasar in Bali which sometimes doesn't turn up.
Some of the children show clear signs of malnutrition. Malaria and dengue fever from mosquitoes are common, and there are less than two dozen East Timorese doctors.
There is little traffic on the long avenues, laid out parallel to the sea front in the days of Porto (Timorese for the Portuguese administration), mainly ancient taxis rattling past verges where pigs, goats and hens roam free, and no high-rise buildings and just a few modern shops.
People buy their basic necessities in cavernous, ill-lit stores which are sometimes plunged into complete darkness when the electricity fails. There is little to do after sunset, with only one cinema, currently showing True Love on Dolby Stereo, starring Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore.
The high-tide line on the strand, where the hulk of a beached landing craft serves as a reminder of the invasion 23 years ago, is marked by rubbish, and untreated sewage runs straight into the sea through concrete ducts.
Unlike the resort towns of Indonesia, Dili has no luxury hotels or air-conditioned restaurants. Services are basic. When I ordered fish in my Chinese-owned pension, the chef walked across the road to the beach to bargain with a fisherman. It is a sleepy town but not always tranquil.
On September 5th, rebels set fire to 190 of the 322 kiosks at the Mercado, the old city market where peddlers, many of them Indonesian immigrants, sell everything from betel nuts to old Portuguese coins.
Due to the political turmoil, foreigners were until recently discouraged from coming to East Timor, though Indonesians are welcome as colonisers. Some 25,000 people enter the territory each year to seek employment or start a business, according to the Governor, Mr Abilio Jose Osorio Soares. Outside Dili there are settlement towns like Aileu, with cement housing.
The old Portuguese coffee plantations are still run by cronies of former President Suharto, who was deposed in May, and the beneficiaries of East Timor's other source of wealth, the natural oil and gas deposits off the south coast, are Indonesian and Australian oil companies.
The interior is picturesque, with fields of acacia and coconut trees, groves of sandalwood and irrigated rice fields. Here too life is very hard, with people often going hungry. Last year the corn, banana and pineapple crops failed on the northern side of the island due to El Nino-induced drought.
As in Dili, social life in the villages revolves around the Catholic church, and organisations like Caritas try to help the poor and starving. The week before last, the Bishop of Baukau climbed a mountain to plant the first Christian cross in a hilltop village so remote that it was never colonised by the Portuguese and the villagers still use bows and arrows for hunting.
It will be treated with more reverence, said the nun, than the statue of Christ erected by the Indonesian government as a symbol of integration.