On my second morning in Dili, we went to the garden at Cinquo de Mayo Park. It's a well established area with Banyan and other large trees. There are plenty of cement tables with cement benches to accommodate the large number students attracted by the strong free wifi signal.
The more traditional garden was across the street. I saw lots of Lantana as well as some Fragipani. There were three or four other plants that I recognized but could not name. It's a formal garden design -- flowers trimming lawns with paths crossing midway in both the horizontal and vertical axes. The maintenance was not as strong as it could have been.
Then we walked up to the post office, built with Korean development money. It's a spectacular modern building with a cement pond out front and a lovely walkway over to the entrance. Other than two employees and two tourists (us), it was dead empty. There is no postal delivery service here, so the post office serves as a place for aid workers to pick up packages. Bob wanted to go to buy stamps for a dealer he knows in Portugal. Sales to foreign collectors seems to be the main purpose of stamp sales here.
Since the afternoon rains had come on schedule, we popped into a coffee shop next door. It's the streetfront for a coffee cooperative in the hills, and Leticia is its face. She's a bright positive force to be reconnect with. Her smile is infectious and her English is better than my Tatun. At the same time, there were many moments that I wasn't sure which language she was using.
Coffee, she said, has three pickings a year. It takes about three years for a plant to mature, and the current plants are from seeds of the Portuguese era. When a coffee bush grows to about three meters tall, it's pruned back to one meter. This is usually around the third picking.
Beans at this cooperative are harvested by hand, which helps maintain quality. I asked, and vaguely recall that the yield is something like three metric tones per hectare. Leticia is currently working with an Australian company to distribute the crops.
Australian companies are not always reputable. There is currently an agreement with an Aussie company over oil extraction that is not favourable to East Timor. After it was signed, the Timorese discovered that the Aussie company that built the Parliament building added in some listening devices (bugs) in the Cabinet Chambers that were not on the building’s plans.
The rain stopped and we went on our way. To watch a movie (Keeping Up With the Joneses) in a nearly empty theatre. It was great fun, full of unexpected plot points.
A very full second day.
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