Wetter Weather, Plenty of Sun and Red Turtles

Finally some rain! I write this on a grey, damp Wednesday morning. It's been raining most of the night.. my rain gauge says 58mm in the last 24 hours. Nothing too heavy, but needed to sustain life! The first half of August I measured 27mm of rain. In the last week, another 130mm. These numbers can sound like a lot, if you compare to non-tropical places. Example: Manchester gets a bad rap as a wet place in England, but average rainfall in Manchester for August is .. 79mm (source). So you're thinking "But, if Manchester is wet and Phuket is wetter, it must be really wet and crappy in Phuket, right?". WRONG. It's a different kind of rain. Manchester gets that English drizzle. It can be damp and grey all day and the records show 10mm of rain. Here you can get a sudden thunderstorm, lasts 1 hour and you get 40mm of rain. Phuket is tropical and very green. Green things can't grow without some rain. We get plenty of rain here, but the question is really "How often will rain affect my holiday plans?". Well... a little rain in the day won't mess you around much, you can take trips, go explore the island, go diving, no worries. At this time of year maybe carry a small umbrella. Rain won't hurt you, and indeed if you have not spent much time in tropical zones, a big ol' thunderstorm can be quite exciting!

So has the 130mm of rain this week messed me around? No. It's largely been quite a hot and sunny week. Some of the rain has been at night, some has been during the day. There's not been much wind so we've seen localised thunderstorms. My wife called me a couple of days ago to day it was raining hard at our house near Phuket Town. I was at Karon Beach and the sky was blue! Distance from one to the other, about 10km as the eagle flies... but with a 1700 foot hill in between us. Wednesday and Friday evenings I was in Phuket Town, checking out the Por Tor Festival (Hungry Ghost Festival), a small festival of Chinese origin. Very interesting and a couple of nice dry warm evenings in Phuket Town.





(above) Street outside the market on Ranong Road in Phuket Town

And red turtles! These red turtle cakes, called Ang Ku, are used as offerings in the festival. We visited the famous Keng Tin Chinese bakery. Many people buy their turtles here, the shop is now being run by the great grand daughter of the first owner...



And on to the Por Tor Kong shrine. You can find much more information about the festival on my Phuket Blog here : Por Tor Festival.



More hot days over the weekend, mixed with a little rain, but really nice conditions for being on the water. Sometimes at this time of year you can't be sure of not getting seasick, but there's not been a lot of wind this last week. Diving has been good and the dive boats have been busy, with many people taking advantage of the good weather. Some of our customers saw a whaleshark last week, nice!

Yesterday had been a mix of sun and sudden downpours, but the late afternoon looked good, and the After Beach Bar was beckoning ... I met up with the owner of the excellent Travelfish website for a couple of beers with a view. If you think there might be a good sunset coming, this is a good place to be ....!





Not bad, eh? The coastline south of Kata Beach has quite a few viewpoints, there's also the 3 Beaches Viewpoint, the Naiharn Viewpoint and of course Phromthep Cape. All good for sunsets.

Don't know if we'll get a sunset today .. it's 8:30am and the rain has stopped, but it looks very grey to the west. Well, you can't have great weather every day in the low season!