Here comes the rain again

I know I talked about the rain not that long ago, but I still have more to say. It must be my Britishness coming out, or maybe it's just because there's so much of the stuff here and it impacts more than just my choice of shoes.

In Réunion, some roads have what they call a "radier" (I don't know how to say this in English, any suggestions welcome!) The road crosses a ravine which is dry for most of the year. In the wet season, after a heavy downpour, the river crosses the road, making it temporarily inaccessible. There's a radier in the town where my Mother-in-Law lives, but I had never seen it "in action" until last week.

 

Despite the warning signs and the giant red and white barrier, we did see a man pedal across on his bicycle with a typical French disregard for the rules. I was told that the people of the town know when it's safe to cross and it saves them taking a huge detour on the "quatre voies" main road.

There's been talk for a long time about building a bridge here as the closure of the radier causes huge traffic jams in the town. I don't know whether they'll ever actually get around to it though. It rained non-stop for several days and the road was closed for about a week while I was there.

Back in Mauritius, you can judge how heavily it has been raining by the price of tomatoes. Unlike in Europe, tomatoes are rarely grown in greenhouses here, so the fragile plants suffer a lot when it starts to rain. Generally we pay between 40-60 rupees (According to the internet, 40 rupees is currently worth 78p) for half a kilo of nice, local tomatoes; this morning the cheapest ones I could find were 120 rupees. I decided not to buy any at that price, so tonight we'll be eating homemade green papaya salad with our roast chicken.

When you have nowhere to go, watching rain like this is pretty impressive:

 

The roof of our house, like many Mauritian houses, is flat. Our landlady is planning to build another floor one day, but for the moment it is where we hang our washing, and where the water tank and solar water heater live. Unfortunately, the builder made an elementary mistake - the roof is totally flat, without a slope to allow rainwater to drain away, so when I went upstairs yesterday, I realised that we now have a lake above our heads.

 

It was pretty in the evening though with the reflection of the sunset...

The weather forecast here is not very helpful; in fact it's more like a summary of the day's weather than a prediction for the next day. I thought we would be better off just looking out of the window and deciding for ourselves, but I learned today that that isn't always a good plan either. We left home in blazing sunshine this morning, but by the time we reached the main road, you could hardly see out of the windscreen. Instead of the water crossing the road like at the radier, it was flowing down the middle like a river. I just hope it's going to calm down a bit this week as we have places to go and people to see, and we're doing it all by bus because our car is poorly.

How do you do an anti-rain dance?