From photos I've seen of the recent dust storm in Sydney it looks very much like the Harmattan storms which we have several times a year here (usually November). If you're lucky enough to be inside you rush around battening down the hatches (too bad about the metal louvres in the kitchen and bathroom which don't exactly meet each other to close) and try to breathe through the dust that still makes it through. If you're on the road it's like pea soup fog you drive gingerly through to avoid crashing into something or someone, but scratches paintwork, fills your car fan, and overwhelms the motorbike riders (most common form of transport here) with dust in their hair, mouth, nose.... who, often as not, stop in the middle of the road without lights on to cope with that while you're following behind, which brings me back to not crashing, an occupation which takes a lot of my concentration every day here. When it's not storming during the season dust just hangs in the air, which at twilight and sunset also looks like a brown fog. If you take photos with a flash at night it bounces off the dust particles, with little blossoms of light covering what you wanted to capture behind them.It's been hot and dry the last few days and we may be getting Harmattan early which means an extremely short (though wet) rainy season since it started late too, a potential disaster for local crops. I was lucky to miss a very long hot season by being in Australia earlier in the year, but it has heated up enough already for the 'mini-hot season' and leaves are already falling off my vines and trees with the dryness and heat - just weeks after the Ouaga flood!! I close up the whole house when I go out just in case: rather a hot house to come back to than one covered in dust and objects blown all over the place. Some of the plants are loving the sun, however, and thriving as long as we keep feeding them water. I'll have my first papayas, we have another bumper crop of cinnamon apples (similar to custard apples), but the passionfruit is specializing in luxurious leaves and extremely little fruit. No show on the guavas, too. I've branched out into flowering plants, too, with my friend Janet donating some cuttings of things which worked well in her garden, a stately "Rose de Sahel" from Jane that hasn't stopped flowering since she left, and some cheap purchases to make up the change where I bought cement pots. I'm waiting on seeds from home to try some more herbs and small veg.
