Living in the Tropics

Hot, hotter, really hot. Humid, very humid, thunderstorm. Welcome to Bangkok!

The mornings are a nice part of the day, with the sun rising and the temperature at it's minimum - at this time of year about 25-27 degrees. In my 'mooban' it is very quiet and the birds are chirpping away outside. It is interesting seeing the dreaded Indian Mynahs as a non-dominant bird - they look identical to the pests back in Australia but seem to be a lower part of the food chain here. The view of the sunrise from my bedroom balcony is shown below.

The day gets steadily hotter but inside air conditoned classrooms it is actually more pleasant than I was used to in back in Australia teaching in February in non air conditoned conditions. However, outside the temperature is rising above 30.

By the afternoon the maximum has been reached - around 35 degrees or so at this time of year.

From May until the end of October it is the wet season in Thailand. You really look forward to the thunderstorm that inevitably arrives sometime between about 4pm and 7pm each day. It certainly cools things down for a while.

It takes sometime for the storm to hit - you can see it coming from far away but it seems to move slowly. The street vendors continue with their business seemingly able to read the conditions and leaving waterproofing their stalls in plastic tarpaulins until the last moment.

The sky is amazing as the storm approaches, with huge clouds growing higher and higher ready to dump their loads on the city below.

The sky gets darker and darker and the wind starts to pick up. You need to make sure you shut all the windows before the rain arrives.

Then it hits. The flashes of lightning, the deafening thunder and the torrential rain. If you get caught in this, an umbrella would be no use at all; the roads become rivers and the rain can come in sideways.

Enormous amounts of water fall, often for as little as 10 minutes or sometimes up to an hour. Bangkok starts to resemble the "Venice of the East" that it used to be called and if you are going somewhere, you give up any plans of arriving at your destination on time.

It certainly keeps the garden green - I have not needed to water anything since I have been here - God has taken care of that! The photo below shows the side of my house slowly turning into a lake.

They tell me it will stop soon and by November the rain will disappear. We then go into the dry season and the temperature steadily climbs until it peaks in April and then the rains come again.

I think I will miss the rain.