VICTOR PAUL BORG EXTOLS THE VIRTUES OF MONSOON HOLIDAYS
We watched the day coming to a close in a dramatic dénouement. Villagers from the tiny fishermen’s settlement foraged in the rocky puddles off the beach. Reminiscent of egrets, they searched for urchins, sea cucumbers and seashells for dinner. All around us, crabs were hastily digging holes and seashells heaved themselves up the beach for the night. Overhead, the thin cover of clouds, stretching across the vast sky, was ablaze with variegated crimson and purple. Then the light disappeared, the sky darkened and the lightshow began: flashes of lightning at the northern and southern fringes of the sky, so distant that the thunder was inaudible. The crackling lightning was impressive and ominous. We could taste the cool air wafting outwards from the storms – hence the urgency to get indoors ahead of the night and the squalls.
We were on a beach in Thailand and the rainy season echoed around the region, repeating the drama in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
RAINY ISOLATION
The storms didn’t reach us during our short stay: my girlfriend and I, sitting on a log with our bare feet in the sand, could marvel at the lightshow every evening. The beach was all ours; it was low season and we were the only guests at the resort.
The manager had learnt our names, knew exactly how much salt and chilli we liked in our food and at what time we liked to have dinner. Eating was a slow affair, served on a table overlooking the beach; and in the empty restaurant the evenings too belonged to us – we could laugh and talk freely, or stay up late, without worrying that we were bothering other diners.
We felt like pioneers, in an embrace with our surroundings, as if everything was created for us – just the kind of emotions that make me choose my holidays in Asia in the rainy season. It’s a time when locals hunker indoors and foreigners stay away, making it ideal for an escape. Resorts are tranquil and felicitous: the people who serve the tourists have the time to get closer to those few that do turn up, offering a more personal and attentive service – and room rates are slashed.
And the rainstorms? They’re part of the package of attractions; the rainy season is deliciously evocative and vivacious. It’s certainly more eventful that the dry season; the limpid monotony of sunny calmness and endless blue sky. In the monsoon season the milieu is engaging in its unpredictability. Fickle and moody weather heightens the days. In Palawan last year, I passed the blustery days sitting on the terrace of our beachfront hut engrossed in the moods of the sea and the sky. It was an inspirational world in the throes of renewal and creation. The dark clouds scudding overhead, coalescing then splitting; a trail of them snagged to the peaks of the karst pinnacles; the rainbows forming in the haze of rain and the playful sea – tufts of surf, long swells rising and falling in a timeless and entrancing quality.
NATURAL WONDERS
There is a primeval and heavenly quality to the world in the rainy season. Forests are dense, deep green and full of insects humming from within. The air, after an outpouring of rain, is crisp, clear and sweet. The crickets make a raucous shrill by day, while the cicadas and toads turn the nights into cacophonies of sounds. Nothing is still; everything is a lucid watery world where watercourses swell, waterfalls become thunderous sights and the fields and plains are flooded.
It’s a time that also rouses the photographer in me. Pictures taken in stormy weather are different. They can be despondent, but always artistic – no holiday snaps of blue skies, calm seas and endless sun – but evocative depictions of skies filled with clouds, or shafts of sunlight. Then there are the sunsets: overwhelmingly passionate, clouds on fire. Without clouds the last sun feebly fizzes out in a pinkish band on the horizon.
It’s this exuberance that makes the outdoors bewitching during the monsoon: the dramatic manifestations of landscape combine with the promise of virtually empty resorts to make holidays unforgettable. For, like many people, I live in a mass of humanity in a city. To escape, I seek the opposite: a place where there are few people and none of the self-consciousness of city life. How I like the long, quiet nights of resorts in the low season, like a magical spell that is lost in the high season to drunken groups, or noisy lovers, or too many lights.
INTIMATE MOMENTS
During our time spent in Palawan last year, every day we would rent a banca and laze on empty beaches. If the rain didn’t abate, there was always the trusty local night-time hangout, where a local band jammed, playing music passionately, afterwards discussing politics and culture. The owner quickly became our confidante, sharing with us all the latest gossip and asking our opinion about the new menu he was planning. The rain outside wasn’t a hindrance – it was, in fact, reassuring in a strange way – and in our wooden bungalow I slept better and longer thanks to the patter of rain on the roof. The holiday felt like real travel: instead of feeling like two anonymous passing tourists, we felt as if we had returned to the home of our childhood and found old friends.
Bookmark This Post
