Mount Ramelau is the highest peak of Timor-Leste at 2,963 metres, in the Ainaro municipality in the centre of the island, climbed through the night from the village of Hato Builico on a stone-stepped pilgrim path to a statue of the Virgin on the summit, where on the clearest dawns both coasts of Timor show above a level layer of cloud in the valleys. The mountain is a sanctuary, and the climb starts at a painted arch marked Santuáriu Inan Santa Ramelau with a verse of the anthem that the Indonesian occupation banned, since the mountain was a place of the resistance; the walk leaves the village in the dark by headlamp, the last lights dropping away behind, three hours up through stone-walled maize gardens and clear streams, then eucalyptus and grass, to the summit, where the statue of the Virgin was set in 1997 and the pilgrims gather each October for the feast of the rosary, and the sun comes up over the cloud with the island spread below. For most of the twentieth century the highest summit under the Portuguese flag stood here on the far side of the world, and the rock at the top is far older than the rock lying underneath it, a mountain stacked upside down by the collision that made the island.
Hato Builico is a village of potato and cabbage growers at 2,000 metres, two hours by rough road from Maubisse, with a few guesthouses and a market once a week when the main street fills with sacks and baskets set straight on the ground, and children cross the streams barefoot under bundles of firewood on the lower path. The mountain is an Important Bird Area for the forest that once covered its slopes, and much of that forest has been cleared for the gardens, so the birds are in what remains. The dry months from May to October give the clearest dawns. Ramelau is a mountain a country climbs at night, and the Virgin on top faces the sunrise.