*sings* IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR!!!
Nope, not Christmas. Christmas as I used to know it barely exists for me anymore – there is no tree, no family and presents on Christmas morning, no hot chocolate and skating and snowmen. Christmas is just another day that I take people out diving (and I am totally okay with that). So, while that song might evoke images of Christmas in your mind, the most wonderful time of year on Roatan for me is rainy season.
I will take a moment here to be grateful that we have rainy season, not monsoon season like some other places. It does rain a lot, but not in catastrophic ways and we still get quite a few sunny days interspersed in there. Rainy season on Roatan also only lasts 3 months (compared to my Saskatchewan winters in Canada which can be up to 8 months of the year with snow and freezing temperatures).
We do feel terrible when tourists are here and have saved up all year to take their vacation and end up in the rain (although we would like to introduce you guys to a thing called Google, cause the yearly weather patterns here are no secret and you should probably look that kind of stuff up before you spend thousands of dollars on a vacation), most people who live here love rainy season!
Oh, rainy season, I love you so. Let me count the ways:
After 8 months of nearly dying from heatstroke every day, the cooler temperatures are more than welcome.
Even people who swear they love the heat need a respite sometimes from the intensely hot tropical weather we get here. I actually don’t love the heat, which is why I try to spend the hot part of the daytime here underwater. I also leave during the hottest two months of the year (August and September) and head back to Canada because I literally cannot take the weather here during that time. So once November rolls around and it starts to rain and the temperature drops to a ‘chilly’ +25C/77F… I do my happy dance because I can sit at home and type a blog post like this without sweating to death. And sometimes I even get to wear pants. PANTS, people. It’s exciting. Also, being able to drink hot tea and cook hot food? So lovely.
Rainy season = slow season.
Now, slow season sucks for reasons such as no one is making any money. But it’s also a time for the people who live here to get to enjoy their island and all it has to offer without hordes of cruise shippers crawling all over everything. Prices are also cheaper in low season.
There is a totally legitimate excuse for sitting in your house and watching Netflix for 6 days straight.
No one likes going out when it’s pouring (I feel like that’s kind of a universal truth). So sometimes we do nothing but sit at home, read, check Facebook every 3 minutes and watch all the hundreds of movies we’ve all somehow accumulated from the DVD guy… and no one judges.
Less bug bites!
While there are actually more bugs around in rainy season, since you have pants on and are normally not sitting outside at the beach, you get bit less.
Cleaner ants AKA army ants AKA the best/worst thing ever.
These are huge black ants that descend on your home by the thousands all at once. It’s super creepy to watch – they pour in around door and window frames, up through cracks in the floor, under the door. The first time they invaded my house I had a complete meltdown because Raid doesn’t kill them and no matter how hard I swept them out, more kept coming back in waves. They were in my bed, in my dishes, everywhere! Finally I called an islander friend and managed to shriek out my problem to him, and he (bless his heart) told me to go outside and stand in the street for 5 minutes. Five minutes later he was there, put me on the back of his motorcycle and took me out for a beer. He told me the ants come in and clean your house and then leave in a couple hours. There is nothing to do but wait it out. They bite though, and hard, so if you ever see them go have a beer somewhere else while you wait. Two hours later, I returned to a spotless home – the ants eat EVERYTHING, like crumbs, spiders, other ants, flying bugs, cockroaches (!!), anything they can find. I didn’t have to sweep for days! They always seem to come before a rain, and when I see my floor is full of crumbs I always wish for an invasion of ants to come clean it up.
Rain doesn’t stop a dive.
High wind might get a dive canceled, but rain? Nope! I have people ask me all the time if you can still dive in the rain. Uh, you know you’re going to get wet anyway right?
It’s finally quiet.
I think my favorite part of rainy season is that I can actually sleep, enjoy Skype calls, read or watch a movie/TV peacefully or write without distraction. When it’s not raining, my neighborhood is an absolute circus. Dogs yelping and howling for hours on end, gangs of tiny kids sent outside to run around and scream all day because their parents don’t want to watch them, teenage boys running their no-muffler ATVs up and down the road as fast as they can, neighborhood basketball games outside my bedroom window with boys yelling obscenities you’ve never even heard of before, roosters crowing at all the wrong hours… the list goes on. (We won’t get started on the guy who lives behind me with 4ft tall speakers outside who thinks everyone in a 1-mile radius wants to listen to him blasting reggaeton at 7:30am.) If you were picturing me living in a serene beachside condo, think again. So I love the rain because everyone is inside and I can get a little peace and quiet. It’s such a treat once in awhile and I am always trying to savor it, because I know as soon as the rain stops everyone will come out to play again.
They are, but they are such good little cleaners! It's a good excuse to get out of the house for a beer… not that we need much of an excuse here 🙂
Holy moly these ants sound INTENSE! Yeah I would def need a beer as well or just taking my butt down to the ocean for a dive sounds even better!
I lost my shit hardddd the first time it happened – I was totally clueless and they freaked me out! Rainy season has been intense lately with lots of flooding. Definitely a good reason to head out and go diving!
You are braver than me, I would lose my shit if biting ants invaded my home!
Also, rainy season in Roatan is no joke! The first time I visited (8 days in October), it didn't stop raining the whole time, and it was similar when I was back three years ago (3 days in December). So we did the only thing you can do in that sort torrential downpour: we barely left the ocean!
If I didn't oppose using animals for work/our amusement, I'd say employing those ants in janitorial services might be a niche worth exploring!
Rainy season… Ugh! I've been enthralled by Roatán since the first time I read about it and saw photos of it in a travel magazine, but the clouds take away all that charm. Give me the scorching sun any time! (Although I understand the much-needed respite from your neighbours from hell! Hehe.)
Those ants sound SCARY! I'm so intregued!
We've had the same problem lately… lots of roads flooding out! Oh well, I guess we have to take the rain to get all the lush green jungle – probably the same in Indonesia! Bittersweet for sure!
Shockingly in the house I'm in now I have almost never seen spiders, which has been great. *knocking on wood*!!
I was so, so, SO creeped out the first time I saw them. But now I do a happy dance, head out for a beer and come back to a clean house 🙂
I'm not a big fan of rain but I can see how it must be nice after all that intense heat! That story about the ants is crazy!!! I would freak out if I saw so many in my house! But then I hate spiders even more so if they ate those up for me, I guess I wouldn't mind haha!
haha rainy season!!! In Indonesia rainy season is in full swing! I do love that anywhere I travel there are less people and everything is cheaper. The only issue I have with it is getting to the airport. I love traveling on the weekend but sometime there is too much flooding to get anywhere. It is bitter sweet.
Melanie @ meandmr.com
I am in shock still about the ants! They just come and eat. They're like that Rumba vacuum. That's kinda cool in a creepy crawly way.
I don't know if I could handle 3 months of rain. I think I'd get a little stir crazy. But if it means peace for 3 months after chaos I'm sure I'd learn to appreciate it.
I feel ya girl!! For me the #1 thing is the temperature. I have a condition where my body has trouble controlling it's internal temp, and so I run 'hot' all the time… in the Caribbean this gets to be crazy when the actual temperature is around 40C! So I relish in the 25C days, even if it means being soggy 🙂
I have mixed feelings about the rainy season! I used to love the time chilling at home in Thailand, but because it always rained in the afternoon/night, mornings would be a mad scramble to run errands and wash clothes. There's nothing as annoying as needing to go out and it's bucketing down and you only own a motorbike. 😀
I moved away from the extreme temperatures in Canada to the west coast as soon as I finished school – I am happiest in a place that is 20C every day, winter or summer and that was the closest I could find in Canada! I am still searching for the magical place with year round temperate climate… any suggestions? 🙂
Well let's define 'that hot'. When it gets around 30°C in Belgium, or more, with no sea around or any other thing that might cool things down, when you live in the centre, it feels like you can't breathe anymore. Also we get no time to get used to higher temperatures, which is also enhancing the feeling of: It's too hot, …quiete quickly really.
I don't think this summer had any 30°C-days but you don't want them here, trust me. 🙂
I actually don't even know if it's quiet outside, I just know that I have a corrugated tin roof so once it starts to rain, it's totally deafening! I have to watch movies on my computer with earphones in because the rain on my roof is so loud. Works for me 🙂
Well I feel like I got prepared a bit before I moved here… I lived in Vancouver, BC for 5 years and they get a lot of rain in winter and hardly any snow (if it even snows at all). A lot of people there complained about the gray skies and the rain but I actually kind of liked it!
I didn't realize it got that hot in Belgium – I always picture Belgium at Christmas time, I don't know why 🙂
But a bit of rain after a heat wave is such a relief!
Yeap, I guess frequent rains can be a relief at some point of a warm period.
In Belgium, when we have the occasional hot 4-5 days in a row during summer, they usually are followed by stormy weathers breaking it all down. That's summer in Belgium.
When it suddenly rains at that particular time, it gives me more or less the same feeling really. Everthing comes back to 'calm' and you really enjoy the rain. But that's only because the temperature got more liveable to you and you get a day or 2 to cool down. 🙂
Can't wait to get all tropical though.
Have a rainy one!
I love the rain too, though my tune may change if I ever live in a place with a 'rainy season'!
Ants that eat cockroaches sound like my kind of ant! I would have loved an army of them while we were in India!
I've always found rain soothing, especially big downpours, so I totally can see how it would help you find some peace & quiet and just shift into a different energy zone for a bit. 🙂
I also agree that the rainy season is such a relief in places where the temperatures are sky high. In Asia, we actually didn't mind rainy season travel so much as the storms were pretty predictable and we just knew to be inside for a few hours every afternoon, no problem. Yes we got caught in a few freak storms, but still way better than freak snow storms I say!
Enjoy the slow season! I'm sure things will start ramping up in no time!