Dear diary…While writing this to you, I hope I am still asleep and just having a nightmare. I look outside and it is freezing cold and snowing. This could not possibly be happening in April could it????
Unfortunately I am pretty sure that I am awake and not just having a nightmare. It is actually snowing outside. The picture was taken from my window (a few minutes ago)…huge snowflakes coming down.
Now I don’t know what happened with the global warming. From where I stand it feels like global freezing. I really need some sun and heat 🙂
The spring has finally arrived to Copenhagen and I feel ecstatic.
The weather is Copenhagen was 14 degrees today and we had a bright blue sky.
I am so fortunate to have an apartment with access to a beautiful rooftop terrace on which there is always sun and no wind. So today I spent most of the day suntanning and reading on the rooftop terrace.
The trees are also starting to get green leafs, but the wind is cold when you drive on bicycle. So I think I will just stay on my 30 degree warm rooftop terrace and pretend it’s already summer 🙂
Every time I return to England, it seems almost immediately there is a weather-related superlative issued for the month I choose to return. We all know the Brits are obsessed with weather, but in June 2007 it was the wettest/worst June since records began (hundreds of years ago), this winter, it has already been the coldest Winter for 30 or 40 years. And counting.
With temperatures as low as -22 Celsius, and a decent covering of snow: 10,000 schools are shut, the economy is losing 600 million pounds a day, old people are burning cheap second hand books to warm their houses (it’s cheaper than coal!) and the RSPB is regularly publishing warnings about imminent irrecoverable bird deaths.
So what did I do (apart from feeding the birds)? I tried to get back to Spain, on Easyjet, from Gatwick. Not a very sound plan. I ended up wasting the day in queues of people whilst waiting for the inevitable “Flight cancelled” confirmation. In the end it came, and I headed back to Oxford, only to try again another day…
You’ll perhaps be pleased to know (I was) that I made it back to Spain having rescheduled my flight for 3 days later. I got to Barcelona, wasn’t as pleasantly surprised as I’d hoped by the ‘warm climes’ here, and have promptly set about sorting out my crap Sony Vaio (sounds like it has chronic wind) so that I can get on with my IVOZI audio work soon.
On that note, I finally got my hands on the Zoom H2 Recorder and will be starting recording again in a couple of days.
I’ll leave you with a photo of my mother’s back garden in Eynsham, England where I stayed during my weather related incarceration. I tried to feed the birds, but my nuts promptly froze.
Rurrenabaque to me was like arriving in heaven. After spending several month freezing in the beautiful south of Peru and La Paz, the hot lowland was a very welcome change.
This friendly frontier town is probably Bolivia’s most beautiful lowland settlement (elevation 105 m). It is a small city, which enables you to walk all over the city by foot in no time at all. Most of the buildings are two story buildings which makes the city very comfortable.
The town has become a great travellers hub with many restaurants, cheap (good) guesthouses, hammocks, travel agencies and swimming pools. I absolutely loved it.
Most travellers head up the Rio Beni to visit the surrounding jungle in Madidi National Park and the savanna-like grasslands (pampas). I highly recommend both the city and the tours. It was a wonderful experience for me.
The rainy season in Chiang Mai is fascinating and lasts from around June to about October. As opposed to most guidebooks I actually recommend people visit the city during this time of the year. There are several reasons for this: a) the rainy season doesn’t mean that it rains day and night, far from the truth. It may rain for one hour in the late afternoon and then not rain for the next 5 days or rain all night (when good children are asleep 🙂 ), b) Everything becomes green and the air is fresh after the little rain has gone. This time is beautiful, with many wild flowers around, and it is nice for trekking or visiting the mountains which is one of the main reasons people come to Chiang Mai, c) There is a very low level of pollution as opposed to the end of the cold season (from February to April) in which the levels of pollution becomes a hazard to health. During the rainy season the air is fresh in the morning, and the daytime is not too hot, d) The accommodation in the city is much cheaper than in the high season (from November until January).
All of this being said, I will have to warm you about the amounts of rain that comes down when it does rain. Within a matter of minutes it can change (and usually does) from a few drops to a torrential downpour which often leaves the streets flooded. The rain is usually heaviest in September, with an average precipitation of 250mm for that month. Another downside to the rainy season is the amount of mosquitoes in the beginning (May – June) – do put lots of mosquito repellent on.
The "rainy season" video below was taken on September 16th and shows you how much rain comes down at one time – enjoy 🙂
