Biking in the monsoons

"Life in the wide world goes on, much as it has this past age, filled with all its comings and goings."

A very famous wizard said this in a movie once, and he might have said it in a book too, but those exact words are currently escaping me.

The fact of the matter is, I just don't know what to tell you. Life goes on, and I feel like I'm repeating myself a great deal these days. What do I do? I ride around on my bike, these days with helmet firmly buckled on head and backpack sweating on my back.

In fact, I do that so much that I think I know what I can tell you.

Until yesterday, I had been extraordinarily lucky in my timing on the bike. I was often on it after the rain, or right before, or arrived in my house a scarce thirty seconds before the deluge. I'm still, actually, pretty lucky, as I wasn't caught in the worst of it.

Perhaps I have never actually put words to the rain, which were pretty commonplace the first few weeks and have been conspicuously missing since then. I found this odd, and thought it maybe the reason it's been so hot. The rains do cool it down.

They come quickly and suddenly. Once you start to hear the drops starting to hit the tin roofs, you have a bare second or two to find cover before it hits the streets, big fat drops that look like curtains falling from the sky. It pounds, blows, and consumes the world in madness for ten, fifteen minutes, before dying away and softly sputtering, sometimes for hours after.

The streets flood, small lakes appearing on the sides of the street and worming their way into traffic, the motos and cars doing what they can to avoid driving through and covering everyone else in muddy splashes. Some people, the brave, go without raincoats, but most people wear the disposable plastic poncho thing, clinging to sweating skin. The rest run for cover. There's not much point in having an umbrella, really; the rains are too heavy, and too strong.

It was only raining slightly at the time, having completed the main section of its fury, but it was still an adventure, swerving around the puddles and still splashing my legs, trying to hold up my aladdin pants to avoid getting wet from the dripping bike. Carefully riding the brakes, and wiping drops away from my helmet, and trying to avoid the stares from the other drivers.

Crazy barang, I always imagined them thinking. 'Barang' is a general term for white people, though it also specifically means 'French'. It's derived from "français," which the Cambodians can't say, and became 'barang' over the years.

I'm sure one of these days I'll get caught in the full on monsoon, but for the moment -- I'll just knock on wood, and suspiciously eye the clouds out the window whenever it's close to the time for me to be on a bike.  Because, clearly, that is a foolproof plan.