Highs and Lows

As noted a couple of days ago, Friday morning I was due to take a hike to the top of Phuket's highest hill/mountain, well over 500m above sea level, near Kathu Waterfall. The weather forecast looked like some wind and rain might come, but the morning looked pretty clear. The full story of this hike is on the Phuket blog: Hiking to the Roof of Phuket. With regards to the weather, a little more cloud cover would have been welcome on the way up. I am not so fit these days, and a hike involving 440m of vertical ascent from the start point was a challenge. Was quite hot in the morning, although clouds did appear we had no rain. Rain would have made the ascent and in particular the descent very tricky, as the path was steep and slippery in places. Long story short. Made it to the summit, big round of applause for the fat panda. Many thanks to Glenn! A photo of the view from part way up the hill...



Exactly how lucky were we with the weather? I mean, if we'd had heavy rain on that walk, it would have been very tough, and downhill would have been dangerous. But the weather held off... until early this morning. Today (Saturday) has been very wet, windy, one of those real "monsoon" days. They don't happen too often (and I hope this blog helps to prove that point), but when you get one of these days, well, you can't do much. I was woken at 7am by the wind and rain which continued more or less without stopping until lunchtime. How bad was the weather? A couple of reports in the Phuket Gazette from today...

• Roof collapse at SuperCheap
• Phuket pounded by monsoon weather

Well, actually this afternoon was not too bad, we had a little family party at a friend's house, kids played in the pool. No rain this evening. The headline "pounded by monsoon weather" is a bit scary, but it's not that bad!.. unless you are on holiday and planning a nice day by the beach.

Here's a pic at Karon Beach, thanks to Kerry for the photo:



We had a brief power cut last week during the night, no big deal, we always keep candles around, though my little boy got scared when all the lights and fans and everything else went off. I bought a torch today in Tesco and it just got it's first use.. another power cut as I was doing this blog page. Was off for about 45 minutes, kids did not wake up, torch very useful :) Not sure why power went off. All the wind and rain was earlier in the day. Now it's pretty calm and there has been no rain for a couple of hours. Might be another wet one tomorrow. Well, it's got to rain sometime :)

One more photo from Friday, just got some pics from Glenn. This is me up on top of Phuket's highest hill. The top is about 542m above sea level.