Mount Ramelau tops out at 2,963 metres, high enough that on a clear dawn you see both of Timor's coasts at once: the Timor Sea to the south, Atauro Island off the north. The Mambai who farm its slopes call it Tatamailau, the "Grandfather of All", the ancestral peak their clans trace themselves back to. The whole range was crumpled out of the seabed where the Australian plate grinds into the Banda arc, and the top is bare volcanic rock and tussock grass. In 1997, in the middle of the Indonesian occupation, a three-metre statue of the Virgin Mary, made in Italy, was raised on the summit; Timorese know her as Nain Feto Ramelau, Our Lady of Ramelau. The same mountain gave the resistance its anthem — "Foho Ramelau", written by Francisco Borja da Costa, who was killed in Dili in December 1975, told Timorese to wake and take back their own land, and was banned under the occupation.
Climbers leave the mountain village of Hato Builico around two in the morning and walk up by headlamp on a track first cut as a pilgrimage trail. It passes a wooden chapel at 2,780 metres before the final bare ridge, where the air can sit close to freezing. What waits at the top is not really a view of the ground: the valleys below hold a level sea of cloud, the sun comes up over it, and the light runs from blue to copper across the surface. Around 25 March, for the Feast of the Annunciation, thousands make the climb, and a second pilgrimage follows in October. The mountain also shows its wear — grazing and cutting have left the lower slopes in grass and the upper ones in eucalypt regrowth, and the old pilgrim path is badly cut by erosion.