Chris Ord journeys along the new 100km La Rende! Trek, Timor Leste’s answer to the Kokoda Trail, and discovers a tumultuous history that runs just as deep.

La Rende! Trek Quick Facts

Arrive/Depart: Dili, Timor Leste
Starting point: Asumanu
Finishing point: Mota Dokomali
Distance: 100km
Duration: 5-6 days
Accommodation: Homestays, traditional platforms, and tents
Walk it: 6-day itineraries www.maddogadventures.com
Run it: 5-day itineraries in partnership with www.tourdetrails.com – Book now for the November 2025 tour with special guest, Beau Miles

As someone whose day job is developing trails across the globe with a side hustle scribing the occasional article, I’m 100% biased in my next opinion.

The true value of a hiking trail snaking through any patch of wilderness isn’t simply the enchantment of visual beauty dripping off mountains and forests or flowing along valleys and rivers.

Rather, the alchemistic power of any trail worth the weight of an overstuffed backpack is…story.

Specifically, the historical and cultural narratives anchored to and embedded along a trail are what make a walk in the park a memorable walk into history. The more stories connected with while trekking a trail, the more transformative the experience becomes, the richer the reward for hoofing its length.

What happened along this trail? What footprint of history is embedded in its dirt? What culture is woven along its wandering? What spirits of the past float gently on a breeze or perhaps hang heavy in the fog of a damp day’s walk?

The earthly manifestation of singletrack itself is just a prism; a portal through which you travel step, to reveal the past and, with any luck, be gifted its lessons.

Standing alongside a sunken ditch on the flanks of a steep mountain spur near Bazartete village, the power of that past is paired with a raw stench of death.

 

 

 

In this very spot, as the Battle for Timor raged on, local Timorese carefully buried the bodies of two Australian soldiers. The deceased were members of the legendary Sparrow Force and the grave diggers, the equivalent of Kokoda’s Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, who assisted Australian forces fighting battles raging throughout Papua New Guinea to the east.

After the war, in 1945, their bodies were carried with reverence over many days by these same Timorese over mountains and through valleys to the south coast and the ship that’d take them to their final resting place in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Ambon, Indonesia.

Moments earlier, we stood somewhat solemnly in the remnants of the foxhole the soldiers likely scurried from as Japanese soldiers advanced. Somewhere in between the foxhole and their temporary grave, the Australians were shot and barely buried, more victims of the Japanese advance forging south towards Portuguese Timor’s southern coast and Australian shores.

Along with the battles in Papua, Australia’s sovereignty rested on what happened along the trail we were about to hike.

 

Guerrilla Ghosts

Dubbed ‘La Rende!’ – purposefully with an exclamation mark (we’ll come to that) – the circa 100km trail follows in the footsteps of Sparrow Force and their local allies withdrawing south into Timor Leste’s high mountain ranges.

It was this terrain that played a crucial role in World War II during the Battle of Timor after Japan’s invasion in 1942. The rugged landscape provided critical cover and opportunities for Allied and Timorese guerrillas to resist the occupation.

The steep, densely wooded mountains posed huge challenges for Japanese forces trying to control the area, hindering their ability to move and deploy troops, while offering the resistance ways and means to move around, ambush from up high, withdraw, and resupply with the support of remote village communities.

 

 

Such resistance relied, of course, on trails tracking from village to village, across ridgelines, over ranges, into and out of valleys, to and from caves. There were no reliable roads to speak of, certainly none of use to an invading force, such is Timor’s topography. Over 44% of Timor Leste has a slope greater than 40%, making its interior difficult travelling for foreigners looking to conquer. It also makes a decently tough outing for trekkers.

 

 

Today, the La Rende! Trek is a reincarnation of the route guerrilla forces used to evade, regroup, and ambush enemies.

The trail serviced not just armies that fought during World War II, but also in its tumultuous wake, with a Timorese resistance fighting a brutal and bloody fight for independence from occupying Indonesia. 

The exclamation mark welded to the La Rende! trail name is purposeful. When the Japanese sent a message to the Australians to surrender, the verbal response was an expletive: ‘Surrender? Surrender be fucked!’

The go-between messenger, knowing such a forceful reply would anger the manner-sensitive Japanese commanders, changed the official reply to a more palatable ‘no surrender’ or ‘La Rende’ in the Tetun language of the Timorese. The exclamation mark was added to hold tight the emotional intent of the original response from the Australians.

Developing Trails and Tales

At 96km in its current ‘Stage One’ incarnation, the trek adventure experience is only a few years old, having been walked by only a handful of groups.

As a tourism drawcard, it remains a work in progress and will, according to Australian adventure tour guide, Sam Maddock, potentially rival the more famous Kokoda Track, ‘not just because it traverses mountain ranges as rough and challenging as anything on the Kokoda’, has says, ‘But for the important stories it reveals to those who come and walk it and the fact that it memorialises more than just the World War II experience’.

Sam’s Timor Leste-based company, Maddog Adventures, has been a driving force behind the development of the trail and operates several hosted trips, employing local guides and actively supporting community-based tourism along the route. He believes the La Rende! Trek offers a somewhat more layered journey than its Papuan cousin.

‘Tapping into local knowledge and with their help, we’ve stitched the route together based predominantly on its use by Sparrow Force and local resistance fighters in World War II’, says Sam.

‘But it also journeys between significant historical locations marked by the brutal Indonesian occupation and the fight for independence by the Timorese resistance from 1976 until 1999.’

‘The trail was integral to the birth of Timor Leste as a nation in 2002, as it was relied on extensively by the rebels as they moved through and hid in the mountains.’

‘Lastly, we pass through several places where some of the 20,000-plus Australian soldiers served as peacekeepers between 1999 and 2012.’

Chapters of History

There’s also the fact that many parts of the route were used during the Portuguese colonial era (1702-1975), with each of the ‘Postos’ or administrative centres linked with walking trails set a day’s travel apart.

In this time, locals were likely using many other tracks as escape routes from the brutal tyranny of colonial masters, and for simply journeying between remote towns and the myriad Portuguese coffee plantations found in the highlands.

Sam worked closely with the Timorese to co-design the route by meticulously investigating and recording the trail’s history, speaking directly with locals to capture its history.

‘For us, it was important to record these stories before they disappear, as many locals with direct links to the World War II era – often the children of Timorese fighters – are older and passing on’, Sam tells me.

‘So with La Rende!, you have a quartet of historical chapters revealed as you walk’, he explains.

‘There’s the ancient animist Timorese culture, with traditions and ceremony dating back up to 42,000 years. The echoes of ancient civilisations are seen in the traditional thatched roundhouses and woodcarvings still dotted throughout the countryside.

 

 

Then there’s the brutal colonial years of Portuguese rulers and their plantations, many of which still produce some of the world’s best coffee.

‘The World War II battles, for which the route is named, are still visceral in the physical remnants encountered on the trail, and then there’s the fight for Independence, the story of a brave resistance and bloodshed that cost upwards of 100,000 Timorese lives’, says Sam.

La Rende! was used by the resistance led by Xanana Gusmão. With strong ties to the region, Gusmão and his fighters moved along the trails south throughout the country, hiding in caves and moving like ghosts through valleys to organise and strike their occupier enemy where they could.

This chapter of history is well captured midway along the route, where trekkers are invited into a local villager’s front lounge. We sit and listen as an interpreter relays firsthand stories of how the local community, including his family, helped organise and support the resistance, hiding soldiers, arms, important documents, and supplies in a secret bunker beneath his house.

He then draws back a curtain, pulls away a rug, and invites us into the secret store. We literally step down into history. Knowing this man’s family risked immediate execution if caught by the Indonesian Army – and knowing he knew many locals who did get caught – it’s a moving moment, and somewhat abstract from the usual rest break on trail.

 

 

Trekking Transcendence

Walking away from the village, everything is seen and felt through a different lens – an imagining of villagers on edge, balancing sabotage of Indonesian occupation with secrecy and subterfuge to stay alive. The day’s trail is no longer simply a dirt track; it’s a form of virtual reality where your steps reach across time to simultaneously entwine with those taken by Timorese rebels and those of Australian soldiers.

Moments like these are constant on La Rende!. Be it a dilapidated hospital riddled with bullet holes (from which conflict is unclear), a colonial coffee plantation, its mansions and bean drying platforms, a World War II artefact hanging inside a traditional uma lulik, or roundel huts – every step forward is another story told.

The physical transcends all, of course, as an impressive topographical backdrop to the narratives.

It’s a stunning and dramatically formed landscape. The heat of the day is broken by dips in rivers flowing along the floor of steep ravines.

At the summit of Tatamailau (commonly called Mount Ramelau, 2963m), a statue of Mary surveys coast to coast on a clear day, a reminder not only of the Catholic impost of the Portuguese, but of how small yet dramatic a patch the various battles were waged within. That’s the thing about Timor – on trail or off – you can’t escape its history.

Celebrating our trek at a beachside café just outside the capital, Dili, an old American Army Jeep rolls up. Out steps Jose Ramos Horta himself, the resistance leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and current President of Timor-Leste, out to grab a bite, no security detail in sight despite being less than a kilometre from the spot he was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt in 2008.

Here, in the flesh, is the man who relied on the same trails we trekked along to fight a guerrilla war of independence that changed the course of his nation.

A man who embodies living history and the spirit of a nation and a people who never surrendered. A spirit now immortalised in the La Rende! Trek.

 

Long Distance Hikes From Around the World

This piece was brought to you by a real living human who felt the wind in their hair and described their adventure in their own words. This is because we rate authenticity and the sharing of great experiences in the natural world – it’s all part of our ethos here at We Are Explorers. You can read more about it in our Editorial Standards.