Liquid Sunshine

I’ve been told by a few locals that rain is just “liquid sunshine” here.  That’s some great marketing!

If you thought the British were obsessed about talking about the weather, then throw a Brit into Barbados during rainy season.   The rain here is very different to the heaviest downpour in the UK.   What bemuses me most is that you can actually hear the rain approaching, like a team of horses racing towards you.  It is almost captivating with its thunderous noise as you await the heavy onslaught of water drops.   Our house has a tin roof so the noise of the heavy rain is deafening.  It will wake you up in the early hours and I swear that I have never have heard such hard pounding rain, even in the UK.

I am up in the hills and can see the rain heading towards us from the east coast before it hits us.  When I see it approaching there is a yell that we have 3 minutes to close all the windows and get the dogs indoors before the rain gets to us.   Organised chaos abounds and we are left panting as the first drops pounds our roof.   Happily, the rain does not last long, as is the case in a lot of tropical places.  Too hard, too furious for about 10 minutes before it moves onto the next part of the island.

One of a couple of strange aspects about the rain is that you will get small patches of it.  When I say small patches, I mean you can see one cloud pouring down with rain, moving across the island.  Just the one cloud!   I have also had instances of it raining in half my garden.  One half wet with rain, the other bone dry.  It’s a strange phenomenon that I have been unable to capture on camera but after talking to others, I know that I am not the only one to experience this.  And we were all sober at the time of witnessing this too!

For a small island that is only 166 square metres, you can find yourself driving from one area in the sun, then bam! You hit rain.  When you get to your destination it’s dry again!  There’s definitely certain areas that seem to attract the rain too.  When we lived on the West Coast and drove towards the south, we would often hit rain when we came to Holetown.  Now that we live in the centre of the island we can actually see the dark, water laden clouds head towards Holetown with intent!