Here’s the photo album from my recent ten days on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. Most pix are from the town of Šibenik, various spots in the River Krka national park, the island of Zlarin and the hills north-east of Šibenik.
Dalmatia is an excellent December destination for a quiet vacation with walks, photography and reading.
Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist 
Mildly disappointed not to see any spotted dogs.
What beautiful country.
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Ahem. …the Mediterranean? Winter rains? Near a mountain range that forces clouds upwards?
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Sorry for derailing, Trump advisor is about to be sentenced a few minutes from now. The judge has berated him for “selling out his country” which is probably a bad sign.
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I had only two or three really rainy days in a 10-day stay, which was no problem thanks to books and museums.
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Right now Swedish TV has an interview of all the (science) Nobel laureates.
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IIRC Croatia is at a similar latitude to central California (the area around San Francisco). So winter rains would be episodic, with dry days in between. Not like the steadier mist/drizzle you see in northwestern Europe or the west side of the Cascade Mountains in the northwestern US. I have been to San Francisco several times around this time of year; while it does sometimes rain, you get nice weather more often than not. But when it does rain, it tends to be heavy rain.
The comparison with Seattle is that while precipitation is much more common there, one can easily spot tourists–those are the people who carry umbrellas. A raincoat or waterproof jacket with hood or hat is usually enough to deal with Seattle rain.
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South Western Australia has a Mediterranean climate. Rain is heavy, but occurs in short bursts. If it is raining, you can get under cover to wait it out, confident that it will stop for a while after 10-15 minutes. If you try that in Hong Kong (which I did a few times after I first arrived, until I realised that I wasn’t in Kansas any more, Dorothy) you could be waiting for several days. I remember occasional times in HK when it has rained literally non-stop for two weeks – now that does get depressing. Plus in SW Oz, you get periods of weeks in the winter wet season where you get nothing but blue sky and wintery sunshine.
Doing field work in HK, it is pointless wearing wet weather gear, because it is very wet, with driving rain, but also warm-hot – if you encase yourself in waterproof clothing, you just sweat so much that you get wet from the inside out. I never bothered, and just accepted the fact that I was going to get saturated by clean-feeling rainwater, in preference to sticky-feeling sweat.
Melbourne, on the south coast of eastern Australia, actually gets less annual rainfall than Perth in the west, but is greener because although the rain is much lighter, it is much more constant and frequent. It is more like Seattle rain – you can just about walk around all day in the rain there and not get wet, as long as you are wearing something moderately water resistant (discounting occasional thunderstorms).
I once went to what was alleged to be the wettest place on earth, on the island of Kauai in Hawaii (geologically the oldest of the islands). The claim for wettest place on earth is disputed – it depends on how you define it. In terms of maximum mean annual rainfall, Cherrapunji in India holds the title. The very weird valley on Kauai is called the wettest place because it never actually stops raining, not ever, but it is like fine mist – it is weird because it is so constantly wet that all of the trees are stunted miniatures.
Kauai is the most visually beautiful place (I shoudn’t say place, because it has such a surprising range of different environments on one island) I have ever been to. Everyone owes it to her/himself to go there once to tour the whole island, or as much of it as is accessible (those you are not allowed to enter on foot you can see from the air by helicopter or light aircraft), but in the knowledge that many of the ecosystems have been changed pretty dramatically since Polynesian settlement (which looks like it was as recent as around 1100-1200AD, although some claim that Polynesians arriving from Tahiti displaced previous inhabitants).
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That is a truly lovely photo.
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