Panas, panas sekali - talkin' bout the weather

Sticky and steamy on the way to my stop this morning, late because I spent time after breakfast studying new words. One of the benefits, though, of heading to work after 9am is that fewer people are travelling, increasing my chances of being the only passenger in the angkota. So it was this morning. Sitting opposite the open door, windows open, I could feel a nice breeze, cooling. A pleasant start to the day. Just me and the driver, I thought, and then I saw some hair on the seat next to the driver. Sprawled asleep, a child, no more than 2 years old. Dropped off at UKSW, I returned to the mugginess of the day.

It set me thinking about how, in Australia, we have many ways to describe the heat of the day: hot, really hot, brutal, punishing, a scorcher, blazing, sticky, humid, sweltering, muggy, foul, and so on. Here, there is not as much variety. Usually two terms are used: panas (hot) and its superlative panas sekali (really hot); the other is lembab (humid). When I got to my building, I went and talked with Dyah and Tri about other possible terms I could use. To describe a "sticky" day, Dyah said I can combine panas dan lembab. If it's really hot, I can say that it's as hot as hell: panas sekali seperti neraka. There's also gerah (Javanese, I think, for sticky, stifling). Other than that, there seems to be few ways to describe the heat. Don't the Inuit have 47 ways (number invented at random) to describe the snow? Why don't Indonesians have 34 ways to describe the heat? Maybe the weather in Indonesia is more constant, and the lack of variation between the wet and the hot/dry means that a small number of words will suffice to describe the heat.