The Wet Season Slaps us in the Face.

The kitchen building, with lakes forming.

   In one of our previous entries, we detailed our weather woes in the time leading up to the real wet season.  It was hot, it was dry, and it was dusty.  The land was parched, and streambeds were so desolate that you didn’t know water had once flowed there.  Then it rained.  The showers started coming fairly regularly in mid-November, and we were getting a good amount nearly every day.  In the afternoon, the clouds would roll in and block out an otherwise scorching sun, the wind would pick up, and by 5pm there would be some rain.  If it wasn’t at the homestead, it was somewhere else on the property, but nonetheless, the rain and clouds cooled everything off to the point of being cold.  I’m not kidding, sometimes we wore long-sleeved shirts.  We even made beef stew one night to warm up.  Then it rained more, and more, and more, and then Darwin got hit by a cyclone; only the 4^th one in the month of November since records began.  Suddenly we were packing up our house and planning for a quick getaway should the river rise and flood us all out.  What did someone say about too much of a good thing?  We were checking the river everyday to see how far it had risen, and watching the radar like it was some kind of fortune-telling machine that would quickly decide our fates.  How serious was it?  Well, the managers left for a weekend and couldn’t get back in because some of the main access road was so water logged that they would’ve gotten stuck in the mud.  They had to be flown in by chopper, along with the groceries and other goods from town.  What started as a hot, dry month, ended up being the wet season announcing itself rather loudly (and quite impolitely at that).

The kitchen and front of our house, dry.

  In the end, we probably got somewhere between 200-400mm of rain in November (8-16 inches, depending on where you were on the property).  The unique thing about the terrain here is its impermeability.  There’s a lot of rock and clay-based soils, which require a nice gentle rain in order to get wet.  Instead, we were getting a lot of downpours, something typical of this time of year.  That means that in a lot of areas, when it rains, it gushes over the rocky hills, runs into the little creeks, and finds its way to the rivers in no time at all.  One of the bigger creeks that you cross on your way to the homestead was full and running in a couple days after being dry since May. 

Along the back of our house, dry.

Along the back of our house, wet.

   In between the downpours and frantic packing of our possessions, we managed to get out and swim in the now-flowing waterholes, and observe the vast changes that take place here when you just add water.  Trees turned the brightest shade of green, grasses that you thought were brown tufts of nothing quickly sprouted green shoots, and the frogs began a chorus that would make the three tenors sound like three drunk college students shouting ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’.  It really is quite something to see such a change in the land and animals. 
   Since the November rains, things have started to dry up a little around here.  We haven’t gotten much rain in the past couple weeks, and the weather has gone from ‘really hot but don’t worry there’s rain coming’ to ‘holy shit it’s so hot and there’s not a cloud in the sky’.  One day we’ll have to put a thermometer in the sun and post a picture of what we’re talking about.  Until then, we’ll keep watching the sky and hoping for a welcome shower, but not too much.