I know what you're thinking: "Why is PT so obsessed with the rainy season? After more than eight years in Southeast Asia, this can't be new..."

But it is, actually. A rainy season like this one, anyway.

In KL (and in Yogyakarta, come to that), the rainy season basically meant more thunderstorms. Boom, crack, downpour -- and finished.

Here, as I've already noted, you get all-enveloping, rainforest-showerhead-type rainfall for long periods, and the intensity is completely unpredictable.

So this weekend we went on an intensive round of umbrella-buying. Two enormous ones for local use during this watery period, and two new collapsible ones, as you can't take golf umbrellas backpacking, and the old fold-ups had amply demonstrated on Friday at Semenggoh that their useful life was over...

This activity has probably brought the rainy season to a screeching halt... It's like when you buy sunglasses in Britain, and you then don't see the sun for months.



A shopkeeper we talked to yesterday said that there's always one week like this. Just one. Maybe he's right. That would explain why we never encountered anything like it when we arrived here almost a year ago (or in March the year before).

It does feel as if it's been going on like this for more than a week, though...

Rain even invaded our cinema viewing, as we went to see The Cave, a Thai film about the rescue of the Wild Boars soccer team, who drew the eyes of the world in 2018 when they were trapped in a cave system in northern Thailand by fierce floods.

I rate the film rather higher than the critiques I've read, and was moved by the way the very human mixture of chaos, red tape, generosity, faith, and courage was portrayed. (And the film-maker was hampered, it seems, by the various exclusivity contracts the boys and the coach have signed, which prevent them talking about their ordeal more widely.)

Meanwhile, we continue to photograph our watery world, where the rain, the clouds, and the rampant vegetation provide all kinds of interesting views:





We particularly feel for this digger driver, whose day routinely starts with moving all the water from one big hole into another big hole.



So, it's all a bit irritating at times, but we're still thriving. And compared with those in Jakarta and Australia, we're very lucky indeed.