it rained
This photo was taken on the Milford Track, a 4-day / 3-night walk in northern Fiordland, on New Zealand's South Island.
Wet? Well, yes.
To get things into perspective, you have to know that the nearby town of Milford received a mean of 6.75 metres of rain per year between 1971 and 2000. We were frequently told that the Milford track area gets around 7m a year, while some of the western slopes of the mountains in Fiordland get up to 9m. The day before this photo was taken, we spent much of the walk being refreshed by most of the day's near-negligible 214mm, of which 40mm fell in one 30-minute period.
Measuring rainfall in metres may seem quaint; and yet Fiordland is positively parched by comparison with some of the soggier parts of the world.
Lloro in Columbia is thought to get 13m a year, though this is a modelled figure that has never been measured.
Mount Wai‘ale‘ale, on the Hawai'an island of Kauai, gets 11.5 to 13m a year.
Mawsynram, in north-eastern India, receives 11.9m annually.
Mount Tutenendo in Columbia gets 12m a year.
Cherrapunji, near Mawsynram, gets 11m a year – almost all of it between June and August. It holds the record for the wettest 6 months ever recorded, with 22.5m between April and September 1861. In July that year 9.3m fell, making it the wettest month ever recorded anywhere.
Debundscha in Cameroon gets 10m a year.
Quibdo in Columbia gets 9m.
Bellenden Ker, in Queensland, Australia, gets 8.6m a year.
And last among these sodden spots, Andagoya in Colombia gets 7m. All of the above are towns and villages; Fiordland is a wonderful wilderness.
The most rain ever recorded in a 3-day period – 3.9m – is held by La Réunion. Now that's wet.
It rained and rained and rained and rained,
The average fall was well maintained,
And when the tracks were simply bogs
It started raining cats and dogs.
After a drought of half an hour
we had a most refreshing shower,
then the most curious thing of all:
a gentle rain began to fall.
Next day was also fairly dry
save for the deluge from the sky
which wet the party to the skin:
and after that, the rain set in.
This poem is found in many websites in a variety of slightly different versions. On those sites, it is variously linked with the west coast of Scotland and with the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. Setting aside those few individuals who pass it off as their own invention, is invariably attributed to "Anon", with associated dates often in the 1980s. I first saw it framed on the wall of a mountain hut on the Millford Track, where it is attributed to an anonymous tramper who left it there in 1989.
I have found one source that may be the root of it all. A certain Ho-Fang, from what must then have been the villagethe city (sorry, Nelson - see Andrew's comment under this shot) of Nelson (located in the north of South Island), published it on 15 September 1931, under the title West Coast Weather in the Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 1336, where it was printed on page 3.
"Fang" is quite a common family name in China and Taiwan, so the author might be Chinese, though in normal Chinese usage the given name, "Ho", would follow the family name. Somehow it sounds like a nom de plume. I can't find any obvious name for which this would be an anagram, though.
There is something about Ho-Fang's printed introduction to the poem that does not quite ring true, and I wonder whether Ho-Fang cribbed it from some earlier source - perhaps (who knows?) even from some saturated scribbler in Scotland.
Scotland? Saturated? Kinlochewe, the wettest met station in Scotland, gets a paltry 2.2m a year. Almost sahelian, if you ask me.
it rained
This photo was taken on the Milford Track, a 4-day / 3-night walk in northern Fiordland, on New Zealand's South Island.
Wet? Well, yes.
To get things into perspective, you have to know that the nearby town of Milford received a mean of 6.75 metres of rain per year between 1971 and 2000. We were frequently told that the Milford track area gets around 7m a year, while some of the western slopes of the mountains in Fiordland get up to 9m. The day before this photo was taken, we spent much of the walk being refreshed by most of the day's near-negligible 214mm, of which 40mm fell in one 30-minute period.
Measuring rainfall in metres may seem quaint; and yet Fiordland is positively parched by comparison with some of the soggier parts of the world.
Lloro in Columbia is thought to get 13m a year, though this is a modelled figure that has never been measured.
Mount Wai‘ale‘ale, on the Hawai'an island of Kauai, gets 11.5 to 13m a year.
Mawsynram, in north-eastern India, receives 11.9m annually.
Mount Tutenendo in Columbia gets 12m a year.
Cherrapunji, near Mawsynram, gets 11m a year – almost all of it between June and August. It holds the record for the wettest 6 months ever recorded, with 22.5m between April and September 1861. In July that year 9.3m fell, making it the wettest month ever recorded anywhere.
Debundscha in Cameroon gets 10m a year.
Quibdo in Columbia gets 9m.
Bellenden Ker, in Queensland, Australia, gets 8.6m a year.
And last among these sodden spots, Andagoya in Colombia gets 7m. All of the above are towns and villages; Fiordland is a wonderful wilderness.
The most rain ever recorded in a 3-day period – 3.9m – is held by La Réunion. Now that's wet.
It rained and rained and rained and rained,
The average fall was well maintained,
And when the tracks were simply bogs
It started raining cats and dogs.
After a drought of half an hour
we had a most refreshing shower,
then the most curious thing of all:
a gentle rain began to fall.
Next day was also fairly dry
save for the deluge from the sky
which wet the party to the skin:
and after that, the rain set in.
This poem is found in many websites in a variety of slightly different versions. On those sites, it is variously linked with the west coast of Scotland and with the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. Setting aside those few individuals who pass it off as their own invention, is invariably attributed to "Anon", with associated dates often in the 1980s. I first saw it framed on the wall of a mountain hut on the Millford Track, where it is attributed to an anonymous tramper who left it there in 1989.
I have found one source that may be the root of it all. A certain Ho-Fang, from what must then have been the villagethe city (sorry, Nelson - see Andrew's comment under this shot) of Nelson (located in the north of South Island), published it on 15 September 1931, under the title West Coast Weather in the Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 1336, where it was printed on page 3.
"Fang" is quite a common family name in China and Taiwan, so the author might be Chinese, though in normal Chinese usage the given name, "Ho", would follow the family name. Somehow it sounds like a nom de plume. I can't find any obvious name for which this would be an anagram, though.
There is something about Ho-Fang's printed introduction to the poem that does not quite ring true, and I wonder whether Ho-Fang cribbed it from some earlier source - perhaps (who knows?) even from some saturated scribbler in Scotland.
Scotland? Saturated? Kinlochewe, the wettest met station in Scotland, gets a paltry 2.2m a year. Almost sahelian, if you ask me.