Stewart Taggart in Dili and Lor – Times have changed for Commandante Elias Falour. Once he was a leader in the East Timorese guerrilla resistance. Today he has an official job, district commander of East Timor's national defence force in the town of Los Palos – and a lot less to do. With the Indonesians gone, there isn't much to defend against. And in any case, United Nations forces still patrol much of the country.

Given this, Falour happily turns away from listening to his radio, and willingly assigns three of his men to show the way to Tutuala, a village on the eastern tip of the world's newest country. From there, we get a stunning view of a rainforest peak towering over green valleys that flow down to the Timor Sea. It's an almost impenetrable area, and it was once a favoured hideout for Xanana Gusmao as he led his 24-year insurgency against Indonesia.

Gusmao is now East Timor's first elected president, and has new enemies to fight. Top of the list is poverty. East Timor's new leaders are focusing on new sources of revenue, one of which is tourism. Visitors, though, will have to be hardy: The logistics can be daunting, and the infrastructure is rudimentary. Outside Dili, for instance, lodgings can be spartan and roads are often little more than dirt tracks. The upside is that East Timor has yet to suffer the sort of tourist development that has marred so many other places in the region. East Timor has other unique tourist resources, too, Gusmao believes. One of his ideas is that former guerrillas like Falour might one day guide people like me to backcountry rainforests like those around Tutuala. "Trekking through East Timor's misty mountains, no ecotourist could wish for a better guide than a former Falintil fighter," Gusmao has said. "To him, every bush and blade of grass is an old friend."

When I visited Falour, he hadn't heard of this particular idea. But he liked it. And if hikers show up eager to hit the backcountry with their backpacks, he'll do his best to help, he told me. Falour's three soldiers seemed happy enough just to escape the barracks. But as they filled our car with cigarette smoke, they wondered if I was tough enough for the seven-hour hike to the rainforest peak above Tutuala. An arm-wrestle proved inconclusive. In the end, lack of time settled the debate.

After dropping off the soldiers back at their barracks, I took a bone-jarring 35-kilometre drive down a rutted track to the coast. There, I dug for crabs on the beach with Felipe Maria Doceo. "If our national leadership thinks tourism is a good thing, then it's fine with me," says Doceo, a village leader in the tiny settlement of Lore on the Timor Sea. As we talk, a few cows wandered along in front of Lore's small strip of thatched huts, which look out over an empty beach and gentle waves.

Visitors might well be tempted to come and spend some time here on this beach, even if the facilities are a bit primitive, but the real draw is a little inland from here – a virtually untouched, 225-square-kilometre rainforest known as the Lore Reserve. Sadly, the reserve is virtually unique in East Timor. Over more than 400 years of Portuguese and Indonesian control, nearly all of East Timor's native forests, particularly its sandalwood, were gutted by extensive logging.

Nonetheless, gems like the Lore Reserve remain. Another is the 2,964-metre Mount Tatamailau, south of Dili. From the small market village of Hato-Builiko, a four-wheel-drive track heads uphill through fields of corn, cassava and coffee, and then through young forests and finally across barren rock and heath. At the summit, reached after a five-hour hike, there's a small Catholic shrine. From there, on a clear day, it's possible to see across the entire 45-kilometre breadth of the country.

Back in Dili a few days later, former television cameraman Wayne Lovell makes a final check of my dive gear. We're at a local dive spot known as K41, and we head off into the surf. Down below, a coral wall drops hundreds of metres into the depths. On its vertical flanks, filter-feeding fan and plate corals harvest the passing current for nutrients, while clown fish, long-finned bat fish and brilliant red-lion fish bob in and out of the coral's rocky nooks and crags. "There's a lot of fish I see every day out here that I still can't identify," Lovell tells me after we go ashore. Thumbing through his three-volume set of tropical fish reference books, I have to agree.

Rainforest, mountains, reefs – East Timor's got them all. And now it also has peace and independence. Is that going to be enough to lure travellers? Time will tell. For his part, Lovell has made up his mind about East Timor: It's paradise. After a 10-year career in TV news, travelling to nightmarish hellholes like Mogadishu, Somalia and Bosnia, Lovell is living the life he long dreamed about – operating a dive shop on a remote tropical island. Like so many others in East Timor these days, he's enjoying the change.