Lord, I believe that it’s raining all over the world
I feel, like it’s raining all over the world
Crawford, R. (1981) A Rainy Night in Georgia
Warm, tropical rain pounding the tin roof of a safe, snuggly beach bungalow must be one of the most comforting, life-affirming sounds. Not so much, however, when it continues for days or weeks and causes flooding, landslides, and for nervous rescue dogs to cower under the bed with every boom of thunder.
Most of my friends back in Scotland assume I am travelling to ‘escape the rain.’ More accurately, I wish to escape frozen, horizontal rain in a land which doesn’t need any more than it already gets, thank you. In this way, I have succeeded. Yet the best planning in the world can’t foresee the change in global weather patterns, especially in an El Niño year. I am complaining, of course, not because it’s impacting my ‘holiday’, although it’s certainly quite stressful during a formal Painting Holiday when the day’s sketching is a washout. The clients are always remarkably good about it – it’s not my fault, they realise – but it does have impacts on future planning, making it difficult to choose an optimal time of year. No, the reason I’m dwelling on this exceptionally wet period is that I find it really scary.
I know about rainy season in Sri Lanka. I’ve danced on a Negombo balcony while the palms swished from side to side and those on sun-loungers fled for cover. I’ve drunk arack with a group of young men from Colombo on a two-day trip to Batticaloa, while they hid in the guest house lobby and the deserted beach was sodden, grey, windswept and unwelcoming. I was nearly forced to swim across a swollen river when my bus could go no further and I did actually swim, alongside my push-bike, when a flash-flood drowned the road I was cycling.
This is not the rainy season, though; at least, not in the southwest of the island where we were for most of the time. I spent four days in Unawatuna before the Painting Holiday began, catching up on some admin, and it rained the entire time. While I didn’t really mind, because it meant I could get some work done, I did rather feel sorry for anyone hoping for a beach holiday. It rained in Kandy and in Anuradhapura, though it stopped long enough for a hot, humid and very sweaty slog up Sigiriya and Piturangala rocks, which I scrambled over on that one dry day. It rained – poured! – and thundered on our final day beside the Ging Oya river, so hard we began to doubt we’d get to the airport in time, though the drivers shrugged it off. They’re used to natural (and man-made) disasters in Sri Lanka and tend to take them in their stride, though all are agreed that this is very, very unseasonal.
With the wet comes an excessive, sapping humidity, and with that, the mosquitoes. My cinnamon-fragranced repellent from Barefoot mostly takes care of them, but the whole scenario is becoming just a little tiresome, and I have been looking forward to something drier and cheerier in Bali. Wrong!
Andrea, on Nusa Lembongan, warned me:
‘It’s been chucking it down for days. Hopefully it’ll sort itself out by the time you get here,’
But it didn’t. It’s even wetter, and a few degrees hotter. After the storm last night, sections of the shoreline, complete with infrastructure, have been washed away, and dirt roads turned to muddy rivers. But the sea, now calm, is still an extraordinary, clear turquoise; the culture, the food, and the temples – I’d forgotten how numerous, and how beautiful they are – are refreshingly different, so I am grateful and happy to be here in spite of everything.
After the torrential rains across Europe this summer which cumulated in a tragic loss of life in Valencia, among other places, and the virtually constant ‘periods of light rain interspersed with heavy showers’ which seem to have plagued the north of Scotland pretty much ever since I left, it’s easy to imagine that it is, indeed, raining all over the world. Perhaps it will never stop. Even the most unenlightened, unschooled citizens shake their heads and talk of climate change. Climate breakdown, more like; and it’s very worrying. If you aren’t concerned yet, you should be, because this is just the beginning.
As I head to Australia – where it’s also raining, although drought-ridden neighbourhoods are apparently glad of it, in certain moderation – I realise how lucky I am to be mobile and to have choices in life, and I vow to cherish every sunny day.