Timor-Leste is a country under construction. The road up to Maubisse was patchwork: stretches of glorious tarmac interspersed with much longer stretches of road populated with construction vehicles and their operators, filling in fissures and creating drainage systems. A work in progress, like much of the nation. The directions we were going off were shaky, to say the least: amalgamated from the collected advice of old blogs and people whose friends had been there recently. Second- or third-hand instructions; recycled wisdom. But that was the easy part.