Banshees in Baucau

The Aussie girl’s arm was still swollen. A few days earlier, she’d been bitten by a giant centipede while she slept at the Pousada, the imposing pink hotel built during Portuguese times in Baucau. She’d woken screaming and seen it scuttle away. It was about 10 inches long, she said.

Baucau’s pink Pousada, built by the Portuguese in the 1950s, has a sad history as a place of Indonesian torture.

The young woman’s Timorese colleagues extracted some of the centipede’s venom, then took her to hospital.