Weather

When we arrived the weather oscillated between ‘hot, humid and sunny’ and ‘hot, humid and rainy’. 'Rainy' doesn’t really encompass the style of rain that the ‘rainy season’ brings. It rained so hard that we couldn’t think. It took our breath away and made us pause to marvel at how this much water could have ever been suspended in the sky at all.

We went on a day trip on the scooter and had to shelter six or seven times from rain so furious that it would sting your skin and make the puddles erupt like they were being pelted with machine gun fire. The uniform in this weather is full body waterproofs with the drawstrings tied up at the chin. We haven’t discovered where everyone buys these, and so we just scuttle and hide.

The sort of downpour that would bring Britain to its soggy knees, clears up and clears off so quickly that you’d be forgiven for wondering if you’d imagined the whole thing. It’s been a whole week since the last daytime rain (and maybe that long since it rained a night), yet no local will commit to the idea that the monsoon is over. ‘Maybe it will come back and stay until November’ mused one guy, whilst generally people just laugh and shake their heads at the very idea. The prospect of it now returning to being rainy seems completely implausible to us.

Something that still catches us off guard is how short the day is. Being used to the hot days being the longest days in England, it’s odd to have the dusk descend like a curtain at just after 6pm. Likewise it’s still more or less dark when Max gets us up at 6.am. With just twelve hours of daylight, it’s no wonder we’re getting nothing done here.