Adventures in Southeast Asia

Where I’m from we don’t celebrate the rain.We dread it, we swear at it, we wish for its departure, but we certainly don’t enjoy it. Although it brings green to our fields and beginnings to our conversations, the average Irish person would wish for rain to disappear forever without a second thought.But things had changed. Somewhere in the middle of Khao Sok National Park, I found myself sitting up high in a wicker chair listening to the rain. Sharp sticks prodded my backside and a sweat-soaked t-shirt clung to my body. Yet, whatever discomfort this brought me was overridden by the solace I had found in the rain.What began as a light patter had quickly escalated into a downpour - a stampede of raindrops pounding on our roof. A disobedient drop bounced off the porch railing and into my eye. I blinked.
Ask most tourists what to do in Khao Sok and they’ll tell you to venture on a trek through the jungle, where gibbons and birds reign. They’ll tell you to immerse your tired limbs in a freshwater pool or take a lazy boat ride down the river.
However, several days previously, my partner and I were unfortunate enough to be involved in a bus crash. It all happened in an instant. The incessant, urgent beep of the bus driver. The dated curtains that kept me innocent. The powerful force of the truck as it hit our left side. The tossing of bodies - a blender full of strangers.
People say that when you’re in an accident, life flashes before your eyes. All that ran through my mind is: this is where I die.
But I didn’t.
And now there I was in Khao Sok, as if nothing had happened. Almost. I was left with one souvenir of the accident: a swollen purple leg. Thus, I was resigned to sitting in my chair, inflated leg propped, as I listened to the rain dance.
I allowed my eyelids to drop shut and pulled moist air into my lungs. The whoops and whistles of gibbons travelled from high on the mountaintop and echoed around my porch. It was them who had brought me outside that morning when they scrambled across our roof, gripping the ripe mangosteens they had pinched from our host’s tree. Yet, once they heard the door creak open, they scattered, returning to their playground in the forest canopy.
I imagined them swinging through the branches, delighting in the refreshment that the rain brought them. I craved the same relief. I limped down the steps of my porch and surrendered myself to the downpour. I threw my arms up and laughed. In celebration of the rain. In celebration of life.