Just One More Before December..

In my last posting for the month of November, I thought I would be a little bit phatic and talk about the weather. We seem to be getting rather a lot of it at the moment here in Kuching, probably because it is the rainy season and there’s a theatrical amount of water falling out of the sky.

You can have sugar shortages, you can have petrol shortages, but one thing Sarawak is definitely not short of is water. It is everywhere – in the bathroom, in the rivers, in the drains and in the air we breathe. It’s the main reason why we have such a humid climate, which can make life fun sometimes for part-time asthmatics like me!

I remember my first serious encounter with a tropical, humid climate. It was at the Butterfly House, in Lancaster’s excellent Williamson Park in the North West of England, more than fifteen years ago. Williamson Park was built by a Victorian philanthropist who, to keep his factory workers in employment during an economic downturn, set them to work building a park. The result is one of England’s best-kept secrets – a gorgeous rolling park with lakes, forest walks, floral gardens and a spectacular Victorian folly, the Ashton Memorial, that looks like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. And of course there’s the Butterfly House.

If you have ever been to Lancaster, you will know how bitter cold and windy the place can be in the winter – most of the ancient city is built on a hill, and the Butterfly House along with its surrounding park is built on the highest and windiest hill in town. So to keep warm at the Williamson Park in Winter one has two choices – the coffee shop or the Butterfly House. The latter is an enormous greenhouse that recalls London’s Kew Gardens. It houses a wide range of tropical and sub-tropical plants, trees and enormous butterflies. I also understand that there are some tropical spiders there too and some snakes.

Entering the Butterfly House is like abruptly passing from one climate to another, or like being transported from one world to another in the blink of an eye. Upon entering the main structure, you pass through enormous clear plastic rubber doors and you are immediately and intimately involved in the cloying, superheated, steamy interior of a tropical rainforest. If you were wearing winter clothes before you went in, they’ll not be on you for very long. Within seconds, your hair and face and body will be soaked with sweat, and you will feel like you are in a sauna – though fully dressed!

That’s just what it feels like for me every day here in Sarawak. Only here, the greenhouse is the whole planet, and the enormous butterflies that were prisoners in the Lancaster greenhouse are here flying around free here in Sarawak. When I first came over to Kuching, I felt the need to drink ice cold drinks all the time, because my body was not programmed for the heat. Eventually, I learned that it was best to take hot drinks like coffee or teh tarik, or warm water because you can catch a cold if you drink too much cold water.

You can imagine how I reacted when my wife told me that I could catch a cold. I mean, how can you catch a cold when it’s so hot and humid everywhere! But of course, if I had a fifty ringgit note for every cold or flu bout I have had since I have been in Sarawak, I could probably buy an Apple iPhone. Or two!

That’s because the body slowly adapts to minute changes in temperature which are undetectable if you are not used to them. Here in a tropical climate, the change from a hot, sunny and humid season to a hot, wet and rainy season means a considerable drop in temperature, especially at night. At first, this difference hardly meant anything to me, as I could only feel stifling heat all the time. Sarawak was either hot and dry or hot and wet, when I first encountered the place.

But now, I really have to be careful to wear something in bed at night, especially during this rainy season when the air is cooler and you don’t need to switch on the fan so much at night. And now that I have a spanking new air conditioner at work in my office, I have to keep drinking warm drinks to stop the icicles forming! By body has gradually switched over and become sensitive to the temperature ranges in this tropical greenhouse we call Sarawak!

So we are now in what I call the Sarawak Winter – the skies are cloudy, it rains Biblically all day long and you can sleep at night because it isn’t too hot. I wish that Sarawak could be like this all the year round, but as they say, if the weather was always the same, we’d go mad with boredom. And the flu pill manufacturers would probably go out of business!!