‘Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies’. Ahhh, that psychadelic song by The Beatles. I am desperately trying to lull myself to sleep with that line as I lie beside Ant though he could well be Indiana Jones as the shack we are sleeping in could easily be mistaken as the temple of doom.
Whilst writing this I am sat outside our room now fully dressed with a t-shirt round my neck to protect me from the mosquito’s, gnats and moths that are whizzing round my head in a quest for the light bulb. If someone had given me the foresight to bring a whole body mosquito net tent I would happily sit in that right now! You see I can’t sleep, I’ve tried, one of the things keeping me awake is the cockroach I lost… Before tucking myself into bed I spied the little beastie out of the corner of my eye perched on the bed frame. Calmly I swiped at it but it shot off the wrong way, flying across the net (which doesn’t seem to be working…we tried patching the hundreds of holes with selotape…. note to self..it does not work!) and slid down into the huge gap between bed and frame. Great. The perfect little haven for a creepy crawly. Meanwhile Ant is asleep, I am so jealous, what I am now wondering is should I wake him, does this count as an emergency? I decide not to and start to conduct a quiet search, finding nothing… (Where do they vanish to?) I have looked under the bed (not a good idea), cautiously moved the net and pillows and nought, zadda, zilch. All I can do to insure our safety is jam my jumper in one gap, my reading book in the other, wrap myself like a cocoon in the sheet and pray it doesn’t surface. Lying there in the dark I could feel things moving slowly over me, tiny little bugs that look like poppy seeds, swiping at them I told myself to get a grip. Then the oh so familiar sound of a mosquito buzzing round my ear, what finally tipped me over the edge though was when I laid my head on the pillow breathed in and a fly shot up my nose!
Now you would be quite right in asking ‘what are you doing there?’ in fact I am asking myself the very same question right now. Well, after a long and tedious bus journey to the east coast, a short tuk tuk ride we arrived in Arugam Bay, promptly taken to a hostel and surveyed the room. It is basic, a cabana by the sea, a shack more or less but its cheap and that’s what us travelers look for, something to make the trip last that little bit longer. What more could you ask for? ….other than for half the insect population to vacate AT ONCE! The bed is okay…. a shake down will do, mosquito net…. repairable with selotape, or so we though, the glassless net less bathroom windows….copable and the yellow water coming out of the taps…. we will let it run a bit!!!!!
The first night we spent squashing ‘poppy seeds’, it wasn’t all that pleasant but the owner was soon helping us, fresh though ill fitting sheets supplied, one problem solved…a toilet seat provided, strike two off the list! Now maybe we should have moved? Why didn’t we, because we felt bad, its low season, there are no tourists due to the war, income is bad, most places are shut and Mohammed (owner) has been kind. He brings us breakfast – passed over the fence from another hotel, cooks us lunch and dinner down the road at a different hotel, he treats us well and I would feel bad taking the money away from him. So we put up with it.
The second night I slept like a baby, it seemed all our troubles were over, mmmn until the rain came. The mattress got wet in the corners…so we moved into the middle. My new fear was, were we going to have leeches falling from the rafters???
Waking up we were dry, relief washed over us, it was a new day, bright sunshine flowed into the room, a beach to ourselves until…night fell and insect city awoke!
The first mission before getting into bed was to retrieve the hairy moth from inside the net, flapping the net got rid of him. Then the cockroach, Ant got out his special chalk and tried to draw a circle round it to contain it but the cockroach wouldn’t keep still so it didn’t work…kind of predictable really. So then we were scrambling round the room sealing our bags…I have enough to carry without adding an insect family to the equation! Okay so then we had the dead spider, lying on the bed…where had he been and what was big enough to kill it? By now Ant has got the jitters and is frantically brushing off the bed like a mad man.
I go to brush my teeth and find two sets of eyes blinking at me, “how you doing boys?” I ask the frog and lizard in between brushing. I shut the door behind me quickly; one bed partner is enough thanks! The millipedes, no joke here, one crawling up the wall, one on the door and a huge one with talon like feet crawling round the bathroom…. probably friends with the hairy caterpillar I found the other night! Have I forgotten any? Oh just the moths, spiders in webs, gnats etc, I am almost positive that there are more unidentifiable ones lurking somewhere; I am in no hurry to seek them out though. So now I am completely freaked out, but with heavy eyelids bedtime is calling. I wonder what I will be dreaming about tonight?
