Alice had been reading a book called Hot Milk. The girls had been to Thailand with some friends before the two of them split off and joined me in Sabah. I know that the friends were Melissa and Melissa - I think there was a boyfriend too- and that Madison liked one Melissa more than the other. This meant I usually became utterly confused when talk turned to the Thailand trip. It was in Thailand that Alice started to read Hot Milk and she finished it on the bus to Tauau. It took me some time to realise that all the references to hot milk that had been passing between Madison and Alice were actually about a novel and not related to coffee drinking. I am mentioning this because Alice obviously wanted to talk about the book and spent a long time explaining the plot to Cowboy whose English was rather basic and the description so detailed and complicated that I soon lost the thread myself. Then Madison translated the plot into Malay just to make it sure Cowboy got the point. The hilarious absurdity of it all is beyond my powers of description. I would have to describe Cowboy's expression of concentrated confusion and Alice's precise and detailed outlining of the plot, followed by Madison's bravura translation. No it would be beyond my power even if I had taken notes at the time, but I took no notes and just lay on one of the beds under a mosquito net, crippled with laughter.
As we were eating our supper of noodles that night someone said, 'There's a Civit cat out there!' And there was. It was sitting patiently waiting for us to finish eating. Cowboy offered it some biscuits and it came closer, finally it became brave enough to walk across the room - and to the delight of Alice seizing and crunching an unlucky cicada that had just landed on the floor- and explore the kitchen for leftovers. It seems this civet is a resident at Nepenthes Camp and lives beneath the floor, but even so it is still a completely wild animal, and I have never seen a civet cat that close up. What a smart little animal they are with their neatly patterned spots and stripes.
Attached to an agathis tree behind the hut was a hundred foot ladder with a viewing platform at the top. Alice went up just after we arrived and I climbed it with her the next morning to see the sunrise. The sunrise was a disappointing misty milk and we saw no animals or birds. But it was worth it just for the climb, though Madison wisely kept her feet on the ground.
Alice had been reading a book called Hot Milk. The girls had been to Thailand with some friends before the two of them split off and joined me in Sabah. I know that the friends were Melissa and Melissa - I think there was a boyfriend too- and that Madison liked one Melissa more than the other. This meant I usually became utterly confused when talk turned to the Thailand trip. It was in Thailand that Alice started to read Hot Milk and she finished it on the bus to Tauau. It took me some time to realise that all the references to hot milk that had been passing between Madison and Alice were actually about a novel and not related to coffee drinking. I am mentioning this because Alice obviously wanted to talk about the book and spent a long time explaining the plot to Cowboy whose English was rather basic and the description so detailed and complicated that I soon lost the thread myself. Then Madison translated the plot into Malay just to make it sure Cowboy got the point. The hilarious absurdity of it all is beyond my powers of description. I would have to describe Cowboy's expression of concentrated confusion and Alice's precise and detailed outlining of the plot, followed by Madison's bravura translation. No it would be beyond my power even if I had taken notes at the time, but I took no notes and just lay on one of the beds under a mosquito net, crippled with laughter.
As we were eating our supper of noodles that night someone said, 'There's a Civit cat out there!' And there was. It was sitting patiently waiting for us to finish eating. Cowboy offered it some biscuits and it came closer, finally it became brave enough to walk across the room - and to the delight of Alice seizing and crunching an unlucky cicada that had just landed on the floor- and explore the kitchen for leftovers. It seems this civet is a resident at Nepenthes Camp and lives beneath the floor, but even so it is still a completely wild animal, and I have never seen a civet cat that close up. What a smart little animal they are with their neatly patterned spots and stripes.
Attached to an agathis tree behind the hut was a hundred foot ladder with a viewing platform at the top. Alice went up just after we arrived and I climbed it with her the next morning to see the sunrise. The sunrise was a disappointing misty milk and we saw no animals or birds. But it was worth it just for the climb, though Madison wisely kept her feet on the ground.