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What we can expect in DECEMBER 2009

Statistics

	Average temperature 21.0 C Average rainfall 17.2 mm Cloud cover 3.6/10 Humidity 74 % Rainy days 1.8 Sunshine 258 hrs.

We've now moved into the coldest part of the year in the North, with night-time temperatures close to or reaching freezing in the hills. It's not uncommon for some of the poorer hill people to stay up the coldest nights around wood fires, and try to get some sleep in the sunshine during the day. Even down here in Chiang Mai it can be distinctly parky, the coldest day in 1999 registering a 30-year low of 3.8 C. The other feature that makes life more challenging at this time is the extreme daily temperature range. After a cold night, it's not unusual on a clear sunny day for the mercury to give a reading in the open in the upper thirties.

The rainfall for the month, meanwhile, is likely to be negligible. The forty-year average for this month is some 17 mm in total, falling (if it does) in a matter of a day or two. Still, you can't be sure, and when your weatherman first came to live in Chiang Mai some thirty (No! I tell a lie!) forty years back, there was a noticeable pattern of 5 - 10 days at the turn of the year when the sky would be heavily overcast and send down lavish sprinkles of rain - while up in the hills it rained solidly. Now if you're biking off the surfaced roads, this can mean you spend considerable periods covering minimal distances pushing your mud-clogged trail-bike through quagmires. And even in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, if you don't have chains and an array of shovels to hand you can forget it. The weatherman once spent 24 exceedingly tiring hours pushing and pulling (along with some dozen other assorted travellers) an Isuzu Elf over glutinous tracks between Amphoe Pai (on the way to Mae Hong Son) and Chiang Mai. Still, this was in the pre-historic days before the road was surfaced - when if you enquired of the Pai locals how, given this was the dry season, they got to the Chiang Mai - Mae Dtaeng main road (100 kms.) during the rains, they'd say stoically, "We walk."

Anyway, normally this is a time of beautifully clear days and cold nights, which with luck will continue through to the end of January.

Oh! I was forgetting! Mae Hong Son, this province's little neighbour to the west, is known as the City of Fogs. In the winter, getting there by air can be a chancy business, planes cancelled or turning back because the airport is socked in. It follows also a lot of 'bumping' goes on, so bear this in mind when arranging your schedule.