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January - The rainiest month on Seychelles
The weather - every day it was 30 to 32 Celsius and it was something. That was because of the 80% humidity in the air. We never seemed to get dry unless we were directly under the sun. Erika would wash her hair in the evening and it would stay wet - hour after hour. You would hang out your bathing suit and towels overnight to dry and it would be wetter in the morning than the evening before.
January is the wettest month in Seychelles, somewhere I read that January has 22 rain days. To avoid disappointment, I mentally prepared myself for a vacation under an umbrella.
During the fifteen days we were there, it did not rain once (luckily). One evening we sat on the balcony and were hit by the aroma of freshly watered grounds. We tried to see from the balcony whether it was raining or not. The walkway below us seemed darker, that beautiful smell was the earth absorbing the dampness, and it seemed a dark cloud was crossing the sky above us. We never found out if it had rained or not, but when we went for dinner it certainly was not raining.
One midnight, I was woken by a huge splash of water at the door of the bungalow. I looked to see if it was raining, and it was pouring. For half an hour I stood on the balcony and watched the drama of nature unfold. The moon shone brightly above the sea, this sudden storm slapped against the leaves of all the vegetation around me, and silently and quickly, a lone man on a bicycle passed by under where I was standing. When I told Erika in the morning, she was sad that I had not awoken her.
One morning on Praslin we awoke to rain coming from a grey sky. We went to the adjoining hotel, Acajou, for breakfast. We made a two-hundred meter dash in the warm drizzle. A friend of ours, Jonathan, was waiting for us there with raincoats and borrowed umbrellas because we planned to go to the nature preserve Valee de Mai. Before we had finished with the breakfast, the rain stopped and we returned the umbrellas. It did not rain later either, though the sky was grey all day. We had light overcast on another day when we went on a day-long trip to St.Anne national park archipelago. This is our experience of fifteen days stay at the Seychelles during the rainy month.
I used to wonder how they photographed those long empty beaches for commercial. Where were the tourists? The empty kilometre-long beach is not entirely deserted. There might be 15 or 20 sunbathers, but they would not think to lie under the baking sun, they were hidden in the shade under the trees, though the shade under the rocks was even more sought after. Mind you, you cannot pick a shade under just any tree. People often ask about sharks. No deaths have yet occurred from a shark attack, but each year several people are killed by coconuts falling from palms.
Diving - I had brought my own diving mask to the underwater paradise, but the experiences beneath the sea surface failed to astound me. From other sources I have learned that my impression of encountering dead corals was correct. From scuba diving in the Red Sea I remembered the colourful and luxurious formations, but here prevailed the grey colour of dead or dying coral. There certainly were plenty of colourful fishes though; all that was missing was the bright colours of coral gardens in the background. One marine biology student told me - "Much coral has died off as a result of the warming up effects of El Nino a few years ago... Coral does not handle dramatic variations in temperature well. The winds of Nino decimated the coral near the Maldives, in the Red Sea, and along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well. But the coral is starting to rebound," he said, "If you swim over there, you will find a few bunches."
In the St. Anne national marine park it was really quite fine. Hundreds of fishes everywhere, though the visibility was not always great.
In the Red Sea in Egypt we dove from a boat an hour or two off shore, so perhaps the two things should not really be compared.
Last modified January 2005
copyright 2000-2011 © Vlado Branko
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