Raining Now

April was supposed to be the hot and dry month, with the rains coming in the later part of May. As in any agricultural society, the timing and content of the rains are closely watched and much discussed, even by people who haven't farmed in their lives. The rains came early this year, the first downpours coming in mid-April, a month or so early. So now everybody is convinced that they started too early and thus will end early and the crops will be meager. It is tough to be a farmer, God (from whatever provenance) is rarely supportive.

But when it rains here, it really rains.

We live near the Royal Palace, which lies in a low-lying area of Phnom Penh. So we have learned that the streets around us flood with some regularity. We were battered last week by a ferocious thunderstorm that must have dumped three or four inches of rain over the course of couple of hours in the late afternoon. I had a perfect view of all of this out of the windows of my 4th floor office, and I could watch the street in front of the office slowly fill up with water. Half a block down to the right where the street hits the Royal Palace wall, the water was at least 18 inches deep. Cars pushed small waves in front of them and one in ten died. Motos did no better, and faced the double hazard of running into small potholes unseen below the water, sending the rider a tumble.

Norodom Blvd, the big street between the office and our house, was not underwater but was essentially a parking lot; filled with frustrated drivers driven off of the smaller, sodden side streets. At dusk, not wanting to navigate in the dark, I mounted the Vespa to drive the 3 blocks home (walking would have meant unavoidably wading through a foot or so of water). I did fine at first, edging up the left side of the normally two-way street now turned one-way by the all consuming desire for higher ground, water up to the foot platform of the Vespa, held off from coming over my feet by the bow wave formed by moving forward. I was within 10 yards (maybe meters) of dry road (heading up to Norodom) when I was brutally cut off by a frustrated car and I had to stop and put my foot down in a foot of water. After that I cut through the stopped cars, drove through two bank parking lots, and traversed the flooded street in front of our house (water lapping at the gate) and got home.

All in all, quite a bit of fun.