A white New Year's

We live in Johor, Malaysia (about one degree north of the equator), not far from the sea. The plus is that we get lovely afternoon and evening breezes redolent of salt. The minus is that everything corrodes pretty quickly. Really. It's frightening.

With the amount of moving air around us, however, what we weren't expecting was to wake up to dense fog on the second of January. And, to be honest, it was magical. The weather here is pretty consistent and, by "pretty consistent", I mean 24 to 31 degrees Celsius, day in and day out, with only the occasional hot day from February to July to remind you that you're on a planet that actually tilts and revolves.

So, on a fog-bound second of January, this was the view of our street:


It looks very primeval, doesn't it? You can almost imagine some dinosaur poking its head out from behind a tree. Every bit of civilisation faded from view and we felt encapsulated in our own private universe. This was the view from our second-storey corridor looking down to our large koi pond:


Those dark-and-light indistinct shapes you see in the background are our back neighbours and, because our little courtyard is actually suspended (about 6 metres above the ground where you see our little pavilion), it truly gave the impression that we were nestled in the clouds. It was as wet as all hell, of course (even more than usual), and the cats hated having to put their delicate little paws on the slick tiles, but still made a nice change from clear and hot.

So you see, you can have a white holiday season in the tropics. It just depends on how you define "white"! ;)