Rain

What are those raindrops doing in the pool?

It does rain in Costa Rica! After bragging about the weather here, I thought we would go without the 2.5 days with rain in January as suggested in the guidebooks. We finally got those rain days. For two days we got heavy rain.

Tropical rain is not the same as our rain back home, which is cold and miserable and sometimes falls horizontal, or the famous Scottish rain which happens almost every day and seems to be the “normal” weather. Here the rain comes almost without warning. You get dark clouds passing over every day for short periods, but rarely does anything come from them. Yesterday a large dark cloud came over and opened up with a downpour. Heavy rain coming straight down for an hour while all around on the horizon in every direction was blue sky. Today we could see the rain moving in from the South; the mountains and the bay which is our normal view disappeared in the downpour and slowly moved over us. Although it rained harder today, again it only lasted about an hour when blue skies started reappearing over the mountains.

Makes the view completely different

In front of the Villa is that road I told you about leading down to the waterfall. As you walk down there you can feel the temperatures raise as you get into a real tropical jungle. As the cooler rain hits the warm air, plants, and water down there a mist slowly raises out of the valley.

The rain here is not cold at all. It is actually warm. Of course it feels cool to walk out into it, but I was surprised when I tested the water in the pool. After an hour of heavy rain, the pool actually felt warmer than before the rain.

So, I guess that 2.5 days of rain for January was accurate, and I can't really say I minded it – a bit of a break form the boring sunshine . . . .

Watering the plants