Any tourist or traveler that visits Southeast Asia during the rainy season should expect to get wet.  We knew it was the rainy season before we came, and we’re used to a lot of rain in Florida.  However, the daily downpours are starting to get on our nerves!  We can’t enjoy a casual stroll through a market or a visit to a temple without getting drenched.  It seems like our clothes and shoes never completely dry out.  Amber said we’ve used our umbrellas more in the past three weeks than we have in a year in the US.

It reminds me of the movie “Forrest Gump”, when Forrest talked about being a soldier in Vietnam… ”One day it started raining, and it didn’t quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain… and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night…”

Anyway, having said all of that, some of the Thai locals and the longterm expats have told us that this rainy season has been… well… unusually rainy.  And all of this rain has caused the Ping River to rise and swell to a level that hasn’t been seen in five years.  The rain falls in the mountains north of here, and the rain feeds all of the Ping River’s tributaries, and the tributaries flow into the Ping River.  And now, the river is only half of a meter (less than 2 feet) below flood level and rising quickly.

Along the river near the Narawat Bridge, Thai locals have been lining the banks and looking down (not very far down!) at it rushing by.  The Thai authorities that study the river’s levels, known officially as the Hydrology and Water Management Center, measure the level about 20 miles north of here.  When it reaches a flood level up there, they can calculate that the water will flow south to Chiang Mai in about 6 or 7 hours and begin flooding the city streets.  At the Narawat Bridge, they have some large informational boards that show the hourly levels as well as maps of what areas of the city will flood at various river levels.

All day, dozens of Thai locals have been studying these boards, taking photos, videotaping the river, etc.  As the day turned into night (I’m posting this at 10pm Thai time), the scene has become a bit of a carnival, with street vendors selling food, news cameras filming the river, parents posing their children for pictures in front of the river, etc.  Some young military soldiers were even dispatched to the area this afternoon to help control traffic, because people were leaving their motorbikes running in the middle of the street at a red light to run over to the river and have a quick look.

The excitement reminds me of preparing for a hurricane in Florida or a major snowstorm up north.  Amber and I joined a very large crowd tonight at Rim Ping Supermarket to stock up on the essentials.  Fortunately, according to the maps, our hotel is in a part of the city that would be the 7th area to flood, since it would require the river to rise another 1 1/2 meters.  Furthermore, the polar ice caps would have to melt for the flood waters to rise as high as our 4th floor hotel room.  But still, a city-wide flood would definitely cause some problems, such as streets under water, bank ATMs out of order, and widespread power outages.  I don’t want to imagine being stuck in the hotel for a few days with no electricity, no Internet, no TV, and no air conditioning!

Stay tuned to this blog for more updates… and keep your umbrella handy.

Tags: flood, river