The atmosphere in Dili has become so relaxed these days that some journalists and soldiers from the International Force in East Timor (Interfet) decided to go for a swim on White Sands beach just outside town, and discovered that there are forms of life just as dangerous as the armed militiaman, which for now seems to be an extinct species.
I myself had resisted the temptation to plunge in, despite the sweltering 30C heat. It looked safe enough but I had been reading up on local ocean-life which includes man-eating sharks, lethal sea snakes, deadly blue-ringed octopuses, stingrays and box jellyfish, the latter a particularly nasty species which regularly kills swimmers and fishermen across the Timor Sea in northern Australia.
It turned out that the calm warm waters of White Sands beach held none of the above. It did, however, contain one of the most intimidating creatures in these parts.
A Japanese journalist, Ms Wakako Yuki, and a female French soldier swam out to within 20 metres of what they thought were rocks when a French officer on the beach yelled at them to return to shore. As they swam back he fired four shots at the object in the water, which turned out to be a large salt-water crocodile.
"We first suspected that it might be a crocodile, but it didn't move for 15 minutes so I decided it was not a crocodile, it was simply rocks," Ms Yuki said. "When we get back to the shore one of the French guys opened fire. He shot four times, and one of them probably hit the crocodile. The croc flipped its tail and it was gone."
There's much less enthusiasm in Dili about swimming now. It's called learning the hard way. That's how I found out about the biting habits of mosquitoes in south-east Asia's tropical islands.
On my first visit to East Timor last year I sat bare-armed in a garden one morning, assuming that the local mosquitoes, which carry not just malaria, but Japanese encephalitis, hepatitis and dengue fever, only bite humans in the evening and at night.
Not so. The ones carrying dengue fever bite during the day, and I was fortunate not to get infected from several stings.
This week an unidentified mosquito-borne virus has laid low dozens of Interfet soldiers with fever, but mosquitoes, I have discovered, can be successfully kept at bay. It means the constant application of an array of equipment ranging from super-strong insect repellent developed for the Australian outback to special Bushman spray, which can cut down insects like a flame-thrower.
But most effective of all is a wonderful Australian invention called the "mozzie tent". This item of outback camping gear has wrap-around protection against mosquitoes and other nasty insects. I'm thinking here of spiders, the most dangerous of which is the tiny red-backed spider, closely related to the black widow of North America, whose bite can in severe cases cause paralysis and death.
The tents are also a protection against tiny scorpions which abound on the island and have been making life unpleasant for the platoon of Irish Rangers based in open countryside at Suai on the southern coast.
The Rangers are playing their part in stopping pro-Indonesian militias sneaking across the border from West Timor, but are finding it much more difficult to prevent the scorpions from infiltrating their tents.
It could be worse. Out in the bush and in the forest there are several types of deadly snake, including the brown snake, which can swallow an animal bigger than its head; the death adder, one of the most toxic snakes in the world; and the highly venomous taipan, which happily prefers small mammals to humans.
The Australians know all about crocodylus porosus, the salt-water crocodile which gave such a fright to the Japanese journalist.
This is an aggressive predator which will attack people without provocation. In Australia's Northern Territories, residents are regularly injured in crocodile attacks.
The man-eaters (person-eaters?) move at frightening speed and can jump several feet out of the water, as I saw for myself at the Crocodylus Park in Darwin.
There for the entertainment of visitors, crocs are enticed to leap high in the air to snatch dead chickens hanging from a string above the surface.
With hardly any other forms of relaxation in East Timor, a few foolhardy UN personnel and others posted to the former Portuguese colony still find it hard to resist plunging into the sea to cool off.
So a crocodile guard has now been posted to White Sands beach.
As for me, well, when in East Timor maybe I'll just continue sweltering under my coating of Bushman repellent and wait until someone builds a swimming pool.