reasons I hate rain

You may recall a post from last month in which I praised the rain for coming and cooling me off. I did admit that I would probably end up regretting saying such nice things about rain, and that time has indeed come. The rainy season here at Khao Yai comes on gradually. It starts in about June. Normally, it starts off slowly, with a few little showers here and there and gradually increases to full blown rain all day by September or so. At least this is what I've been told. However, the last week has been anything but normal. It has rained every single day since last Monday afternoon, and not just little showers, but nearly constant rain. Though I admit the rain does have some benefits; namely, it makes it a heck of a lot cooler. This week the costs have considerably outweighed the benefits. When your research project is about vocalizations and requires a lot of expensive, non-waterproof equipment, then rain becomes synonymous with boredom. Last week after waking up three days in a row to rain, we decided to go to Bangkok hoping for better weather come Monday. That did not happen, nor on Tuesday, nor today. So it has been a REALLY boring and unproductive week. I haven't seen the gibbons in so long! The good news is that  tomorrow the weather is supposed to be excellent, so lets just hope that is true.

Although Monday was an especially painful day because the power was out all day, we did see elephants again! Today we went to Pak Chong to get some maintenance done on the truck. That took a long time, but we stopped at Tesco on the way home and I got some banana muffins! We also stopped at a restaurant for dinner which was pretty good. I accidentally ate an incredibly spicy yellow pepper from the green curry and coconut soup not realizing it would be so hot. I always think of sweet bell peppers when I see yellow peppers. So my mouth burned for about 15 minutes. So those are the highlights of this week so far, there aren't many. but tonight I am optimistic, hopefully we will be about to do a playback tomorrow!

 mom, son (with tusks) and daughter (baby)

 The big field and salt licks (teeny elephants on the right)

getting a little too close for comfort

Took a video because I thought it was cool to see them moving all together