"Buckle up! Typhoon Goring heads to Taiwan": We're caught in rain in Manila, it's feared like supercell storm

The World Basketball Championship is being held this year in Manila, Philippines, and all that would not be strange for the guests who came from all over the world if it wasn't the monsoon season.

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Huge humidity of 93 percent greeted us in the capital of this country of about 120 million inhabitants. For the first few days, we somehow managed to avoid the downpours and floods, and then we found out about super-typhoon Goring.

Namely, while we were making our way for more than an hour to the arena where Serbia's team trains before the match against South Sudan, it started to rain. Suddenly, everyone hurries up. Motorists put on raincoats, people take shelter and open umbrellas, and our driver, a local, goes around them all much more nervously. There is even more chaos on the street.

"Buckle up. It's always like that. But don't worry. It was supposed to be heading towards us. And then it turned around and went to Taiwan...," he tells us confidently and calms down the situation.

Just as our driver said, the rain stopped surprisingly quickly, and apart from the huge crowd and great fear, everything ended well, and we arrived at the training session of the national team, which is playing an important match against South Sudan this Wednesday at 10 o'clock Serbian time.

In the meantime, there was a twist that surprised the meteorologists themselves. Typhoon Goring (Saola) was expected to go towards Taiwan under the influence of the monsoon, where it would weaken to the level of a tropical storm, but instead something completely different happened.

Namely, Goring very quickly managed to reach the status of a super-typhoon and suddenly changed its path, so after passing the island of Luzon in the northern Philippines, it will head along the coast of China all the way to Hong Kong. The wind speed in the heart of this storm reaches a crazy 250 km/h!

Printscreen: Zoomearth

We were lucky.

(S.G.)