Shortly after I left, we spoke by phone and Karen’s team had recorded 12 blue whale sightings that day, and eight the previous day. “It proves the country can move towards ecotourism and away from an economy almost entirely dependent on oil revenues.”
One night, after a day at sea, I was offered the chance to interview the President of the country, José Ramos-Horta, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in the 1990s and survived an attempted assassination attempt a dozen years later taking a bullet to the stomach. I drove a few hours east to the town of Com and…
