Yogyakarta, Bladok Losmen, 27 Feb 2005

Nothing is better than the feel of hard, fresh rain after unbearable tropical heat.

Finally, after we return from 5 hours at Borobodur (left 5am, returned 10am), the rains break the heavy, stifling heat.

It's such an all-consuming thing here. Hot enough to make you drowsy and woozy in the day, like a baby on Dramamine. It feels like being wrapped in a hot, wet woollen blanket.

And then the rains come; cool as currency and pelting like a runner. Sheeting down, pounding on rooftops and roadways and fibro awnings like fists.

The temperature drops, and the air is palpably changed. Our small eyrie of a room, with its four windows and door onto a balcony, has had all the heat chased out of it.

We revel in the shift: excited as kids under a sprinkler, charged as dogs before a thunderstorm.

Thunder snaps the sky.

The room is filled with the cool, clean scent of rain. You always forget inbetweentimes how literally 'sweet' that scent is. Not heady like perfume, or sappy like toffee; this sweetness is lighter and greener, like the first bite of a sugar-snap pea.

Same as fresh sheets on a hot night, it's crisp and intoxicating.