We love the rain. Nothing is better than seeing the rain falling on the dry ground. It means new life will sprout from the dry soil, our normal brown landscape will change to lush greenery.

Rain normally comes around October or November, on and off from December to February, then heavy downpours in March and April.

We have two river outlets close to our house that both flow to the sea, partly protected by the flood defense wall recently built. When it rains, it rains. For us, the implication is that we are locked in for a few days or longer, unable to drive through the flood water, even though many try and fail every time.

We have been desperate for heavy rain now for the last few years, the best sort of rain is slow and steady to allow it to seep into the ground, the worse scenario is huge heavy storms high in the mountains as this creates devastating floods, but very little benefit to the land as it just washes out to sea.

This storm was massive. We heard the thunder way up in the mountains and sure enough, a few hours later we saw the first water in the river. Within 10 minutes, we had a surge of water and the floods started.

With the floods come the tonnes of rubbish washed down from the villages above. For some reason, the culture is to throw all your rubbish in the dry river bed -out of sight out of mind. When the rain comes, it’s all washed into the ocean – a massive ecological disaster every time it rains.

As this was the first real big surge of flood water to test the river defense wall, we also noticed something we had not seen before – thousands of toads and turtles washed down from pools in the mountains. The way the wall has been created, there is no place for animals to escape until it reaches the end of the wall.

We tried to rescue as many as we could, but thousands were swept out to sea to certain death – a real tragedy.

I am not sure what the answer is, we saw many toads for weeks after the water had gone, but I am not sure of their survival so far from home. We now have 3 resident toads in our garden, so hopefully many more survived.