Well, after an uneventful trip, where the only thing I left behind was my hat (in the car at the airport), oh! and my spare reading specs (I think), um! and also my nail clippers and…

Well, after an eventful trip where I think I left half my stuff at home, here I am, back in…ahhh..hot, muggy and wet Timor Leste to do some more training on Solar power for Mercy Corps via the ATA.

My new home for the next few weeks – The Tropical Hotel

The Tropical doesn’t look much from the outside and the inside is an interesting mix of old memorabilia from country Australia. But it’s clean and dry and the rooms have an on-suite and the internet. Not only that but the bar has cold beer as well. I mean, what more could a bloke ask for?

You can see from the photos that it’s the wet season and although there hasn’t been a huge amount of rain so far because of the delay in the monsoon systems it’s already getting pretty wet and we’ve heard that several villages and district are getting cut off by water.

The gray skies continue across the bay in the early evening as I went for a short walk to stretch my legs after a long flight and a short nap.

An eerie blue grey light stretches over the foreshore and then, suddenly….

A splash of pulsating lights of the newly erected Christmas tree draped in a colourful LED display.

It’s definitely an interesting construction of metal, cloth and lights 🙂

They certainly don’t make the instructions on the prepaid phone credit top-up cards easy to read, but at least I was able to purchase a new SIM for the phone and top it up on the first day without any problems. That was also a first!

And so after a weekend of settling in and catching up with a few people of coffee and sending a few emails what more could you want to complete the day than a bottle of iced tea and some fresh red bananas.

I reckon it’s going to be a great trip, stay tuned! 🙂

Oh, and if you can’t get enough of that flashing Christmas tree check out the video.