Over the last 5 months, moving through Southeast Asia, I’ve had incredibly little rain on the agenda. It can rain at night, but rarely in the middle of the day when I’m out and active. So when I packed up my things after an evening visit to a café in Medan and stepped outside into fairly heavy rain, I have to admit I wasn’t prepared. In my bag there’s a laptop, chargers, a power bank, but no rain gear or poncho.

The normal person would note that it was raining and call a taxi. It probably costs about 30 kroner to get to the hotel from the café. But by now I actually quite like rainy weather. I also like walking through the rain, though preferably when I’m prepared for it. While I’m sitting there weighing the pros and cons of a rainy walk, the rain eases off from heavy rain to a light drizzle. That leaves me with slightly damp clothes and a walk through streets with freshly fallen rain. Perfect.

I pack myself up. Electronics go into the inner backpack compartment. It’s around 22:00 when I start walking. It’s rained a lot, and I hop over big streams of water finding their way down into the large, half-open drainage channels running along the road. I turn off the big, busy main road and walk through the gate to the university.

The most direct way back to the hotel is across the university campus. It’s a fairly peaceful area in the middle of a busy city. I’ve walked across the area several times during my stay, so I feel reasonably safe walking around even in the dark. Besides, campuses are empty at this time of day.

There are a couple of kilometers from the campus gate to the hotel. At this point I’m a bit wet on the shoulders and arms. It’s still 27-28 degrees warm, so the rainwater feels pleasantly cooling. Suddenly, though, someone turns up the pressure. It goes from a light drizzle to a downpour in 3 seconds. I find myself on a road, on an open stretch with no cover. Before I’ve had time to look around, I can feel the water seeping into my underwear and down into my shoes. The rain hitting the road comes down with such force that recoil-spray water is flying everywhere. I get completely soaked.

Further down the road there’s a covered ATM, which I seek shelter by. First priority is the electronics. Here I have to count myself lucky for my choice of quality. My Osprey day pack has managed to keep the inner compartments completely dry, despite what amounts to having several buckets of water poured over it. I still have more than 1 km left before I’m at my hotel. I’m already soaked, so it’s not as if I can get any wetter. My backpack is rainproof. So after waiting out the worst of the rain, I move on.

Being completely soaked actually makes it a bit easier to enjoy the walk. After the first dive into the pool, you stop thinking about how wet the water is. It goes on to become somewhat cozy, wandering through the university area in the rain. The frogs are croaking about the battle with the rain, and the fairly annoying channels in the sidewalk suddenly make more sense, given the amount of rain that has to run through them. I concentrate on not falling into a drain or channel opening hidden in the dark. There isn’t that much water gathering on the raised sidewalk I’m walking on, but the more streets I have to cross, the more times I have to wade through ankle-deep water.

I finally get to the other side of campus. There’s a small passage from campus out to the road my hotel is on. Apart from the main entrance where I started, there are only a couple of other exits. And when I get to the passage I’ve normally used, I see a 3m tall closed gate and a padlock. I’d like to be able to say I took it calmly and didn’t start yelling and screaming. I can’t, though. Even if it hadn’t been pouring down and I hadn’t been soaked, that little discovery would have been enough for a small howl from me. I’m inside a more or less closed campus. The only known open exit is a couple of kilometers behind me in the opposite direction from my hotel, and I can’t call a taxi either.

In my deep frustration I decide to walk along the edge of the campus area, in case there’s a gate, a low fence, or a hole in the wall. It’s not the most direct route, but the possibility of finding a shortcut is far too tempting. By this point I’ve been walking through the rain for an hour. What I thought was a small shower doesn’t look like it’s stopping any time soon. As if that weren’t enough, I’ve started seeing lightning flash on the horizon. No sound of thunder. Just the light. But that changes fast. As I find my way around the hermetically closed university campus, it starts thundering and lightning. My little walk has gone from a somewhat cozy tropical rain to an actual thunderstorm. I can live with getting wet, but it’s hard not to feel in danger when thunder starts getting closer and closer.

Apparently physical activity + tiredness + frustration is the recipe for me starting to talk to myself out loud. My thoughts go from buzzing around in my head to coming out of my mouth. If there had been anyone nearby who understood Danish, they’d probably have wondered whether they’d run into a Gollum impersonator out in the rain. Aside from the somewhat hoarse delivery, I’m apparently also very prone to discussing things with myself. Or singing. Picture this: on a dark, rainy, thundery night, a man walks down an empty street. From his shoes comes a squelch with every step. Water drips off him as if he’d climbed out of a pool. From his mouth comes what can only be described as the sound of a howling, half-drowned dog trying to sing Fumes by EDEN. If you pass him on your scooter, you get a big smile and a dedicated tone.

Having established that there’s no shortcut along the outer edge, I finally reach the university gate again. It’s a large double gate for cars, and it’s half closed. Two guards sit on plastic chairs in a small, lit gatehouse. One spots me and nudges his partner, who looks up. They give a thumbs up, from which I receive two crooked smiles. I can almost hear them saying to each other, “They’re crazy, those Europeans.”

I get a scooter called, which takes me back to the hotel. With all my detours, back and forth across campus and searching for shortcuts, I manage to walk 12,000 extra steps. Apart from some shoes, which I’m seriously considering throwing out because of all the sewer water I walked through, there was no damage. I’m taking them to a shoe-cleaning service, and if they don’t survive, they’ve done well on this trip too. It’s easy to be wise after the fact, especially about yourself. It was of course less fun getting caught in an actual thunderstorm, but then again, it wasn’t the plan to wander back and forth across a campus in rain and darkness either. But some people like bungee jumping, and I like walking through downpours.

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