Typhoons and floods

Just a very quick note to tell you all that Vung Tau has escaped any particularly bad weather related to Typhoon Ketsana (see example local English press story). We did have some very heavy rain and storms the other night lasting for some hours and for a few days we experienced quite strong winds on the seafront, e.g. at Front Beach.

However, we are fortunate in our location as Vung Tau is seldom inflicted with typhoons, whereas the centre of Vietnam routinely suffers storms and has flooding every year, and typhoons also more often hit shore in the Mekong delta. Our typhoon warning last year (see the storm that wasn't) was a precaution following the very unusual event two years earlier when a typhoon did come on shore in our vicinity. On that occasion people were a) not prepared for it and b) didn't believe it would happen. The latter is what led to fatalities here :( because some people went out along the beaches for their regular exercise early in the morning and were drowned.

An update on life in the rainy season

I wrote back in May that the rainy season seemed to have started.

However, the weather June seemed to suggest that this conclusion was either falsely reached, or that information about the rainy season in Vung Tau had been greatly exaggerated in its telling.

July has proved to be a different case. We are now experiencing days on which it rains - heavily and sometimes with strong wind or storms - on several occasions in one day. It is a little bit inconvenient because sometimes you have no choice but to be out in the elements. If that happens to be the case though, the roads are quite deserted. If it's a Saturday or Sunday night when it rains, then suddenly all the cruising traffic and groups sitting along Ha Long/Quang Trung/Tran Phu streets - the contiguous roads that go from Back Beach around Small Mountain to Front Beach and then onwards around Big Mountain - are gone. It's as though they've been flushed from the roads!

This morning, for example, I started my walk at 6.35am in slight cloud that soon disappeared into a sunny morning. I got home and showered just in time for Xe to arrive at 8am to clean. Then I went out on the mountain bike for breakfast and to shop at the market, and got home at 10am hot and sweaty. Xe was just leaving and showed me that she had hung the washed sheet inside because she expected it to rain. I didn't see any particular signs that this was going to happen soon, but within 30 minutes it was bucketing down and has lasted until about half an hour ago. Now it's cloudy but the breeze and sun will soon dry everything up. Quite possibly we'll experience the same event this afternoon.

I'm starting to appreciate the rainy season though. Really, the inconvenience is slight. After all, I could just put a raincoat on and go out (I keep it in the motorbike all the time). And everything feels fresh afterwards. Plus it's really good to see the mountainsides green again after they dried off so much during the dry season.

I did get a little bit stuck by the rain recently, though when I finally made an excursion to Bach Dinh mansion (the Vung Tau White House) by mountain bike (another story!).