Clouds in the valley...

It is the season of the ‘little girl’ here in Australia. La Nina (little girl for Spanish) has brought with it moody skies and broody days, a perennial hang of gray clouds giving an unusual sense of melancholy in summer. It is different to the empty blue skies, with a 40 degree dry heat that seduces Sydneysiders to the cool of the Pacific - isn’t that what summer is all about? But then, it is also a welcome difference to the orange, cinder filled skies of a bushfire summer that was last year. After a summer that scorched the nation from coast to coast, the ‘little girl’ seems to be a welcome break, pouring its healing waters to the ash burnt lands, and soothing the acrid burns that will take a long time to heal. The grey melancholia is then a little price to pay. For the summer-seekers that is. For those like me, though - pluviophiles - it is not anything new. We have seen it every year in our homelands, in an annual ritual called the monsoons. Steaming in the Indian summer, 40 degree ...

The Andamans, Langkawi ‘And that, my friends, is ... the Sunda Colugo…’ whispered our nocturnal forest guide. I tried to rerun the words that I had just heard in my mind, none of which rang any bell of familiarity. I looked around and realised gleefully, that I was not the only ignoramus. The guide had a smile on his face as well - it seemed like a regular drill for him - and he went on to enlighten us. ‘The Sunda Colugo is more popularly called the flying lemur...’ Now, he was starting to talk English. ‘...though it neither flies nor is a lemur. It is one of only two gliding colugos, its other cousin found faraway in the Philippines.’ ‘Is it a primate?’ asked one of the visitors in the group, while we all tried to peer outside the balcony (yes, I will come to it) onto the palm trees to understand this cute little grey critter with bulbous eyes and a strange membrane connecting fore-limb to hind-limb (called patagium), justifying the ‘flight’ part of its moniker.‘ ‘The Colugos are uniq...