Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Summer in Samtse - it's Rain Season

Samtse has a subtropical climate. It can get rather hot but cools down as soon as the rain season starts. During my last visit to Samtse, the rain season didn't start until the end of May. We have now end of April and the rain season seems to have already started. Staying in Samtse during rain season means to have sometimes fog in the morning, short and rather strong rain periods throughout the day and sometimes really heavy storms with immensely wild thunders at night.
You probably think that you know what heavy rain is. Let me tell you, you don't know. If it is really raining down here, even a huge umbrella won't protect you from the water - the rain will at least going to wet your shoes. During the night, the rain will drum on my tin roof and wake me up - unless I haven't already woken up by the thunders. Well, my apartment this year has at least a tin roof and ensures that the walls won't get easily moldy; I actually enjoy being woken up considering that I could as well have no tin over my head.
Due to the heavy storms, now and then a tree gets killed and we are confronted with major power cuts. Last week, more than one power cut occurred and power supply was rather unstable. A few hours of power supply, a few hours without. Not exactly fun if your laptop battery is more than three years old and runs rather unstable in this humid climate. Last Thursday night, there was a problem in Phuentsholing and we didn't have any power at all for the entire Friday and power came back only on Friday night.
You might be able to imagine that running ICT infrastructure in this climate is not exactly easy. We do our best and try to cope with the external circumstances.
Additionally, our satellite-based internet connection has been cut for the last couple of days and has come back only this morning. It is not entirely clear what caused the outage but it might have been the rough conditions. We'll have to investigate and solve the problem.

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