I drove down to Kota Kinabalu today. It's a two-hour drive, and is one of the best things about living in the mountains - it's a stunning drive to town, with a different view round every corner. On good days, you can see the sea from the mountains, and the blue of the sky draws the green out of the land and makes everything a shade of turquoise. On good days, Mount Kinabalu hides around each bend, playing peekaboo, and looming above the roads and villages.
Today was a good day down, and a bad day up.
A bad day is, well, it's bad for driving, because the twisty pretzel of a road becomes even more dangerous when you can't see for the rain, but the views are just as beautiful as on a good day. On a "bad" day, the blue mountains haul themselves up out of duvets of white cloud and drifting mists. On top of each ridge, the rain clears and the greenness of the forest is even greener for the wet.
Then you descend a little, and suddenly you hit a bank of mist, and for a kilometre all you can see is the brake lights of the car directly in front of you.
Just before sunset, I was around 2000 metres high when the air around me cleared and I had a spectacular view of thunderstorms in the distance.
It rains a lot in Borneo - pretty much every day, and it's the dry season right now. We get around 4 metres of rain a year, which is a lot of rain, especially for someone who comes from a country with an average annual rainfall of 80cm. But lots of rain means lots of rainbows - double rainbows, triple rainbows, circular rainbows, rainbows that finish in your backyard... It goes a long way to making up for those four metres.
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