There hasn’t been much to post about recently, as we haven’t really done anything new. What has happened is that we’ve completely fallen in love with our hostel, Mountain View. It’s run by two couples, one Thai man named Soy and his English wife Chrissy, and one Thai lady named Tip and her English husband, Mike. They are such an honest, trusting and friendly group of people; we can stay as long as we want, and and food and drink we want while we’re here we can just take and write down in our room book; in the evening, everyone cooks together and shares all food, but of course, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to join in. Some of the guests are pretty ‘natural’ and Sophia and I do stick out a little bit – we are definitely the only people who shower every day – but it doesn’t really seem to matter which is good.

This is our ‘hut’ (number 4). It’s mainly made out of wood and tin, with woven bamboo walls. I couldn’t take a photo of the inside because Phia was taking a shower but basically there are two mattresses on the floor and one giant mosquito net canopy hanging from the ceiling (like the pink one I had for about two weeks in my room Mum, before it got too annoying to be worth the ‘princess factor’). The bathroom is another wet-room, and the roof isn’t as well covered as the rest of the hut, so sometimes interesting things join you for a shower, but our squeals are getting less and less and maybe soon we’ll quite enjoy it (!?)

These big yellow fruits hang from a tree somewhere above our hut. In the night, when the bats try to get them from the trees for tasty midnight nomms, they often drop them onto our roof, which makes the loudest noise and always wakes me up but never Sophia – the first time I heard it I thought we were going to be murdered in our beds by a rabid animal (I had a raccoon in my head, as always) and I was so worried that we hadn’t had the rabies shot!
There is no word for what they are, but apparently they have a seed inside which you eat, and a spongey surround under the skin that you suck on; the taste is sweet and sour at the same time – we’re going to try some later as we’ve accrued so many!

This is the bike park and campfire – its really fun when everyone rides in together and has to negotiate parking spaces

And this is our baby; we’ve definitely had some interesting life experiences with her….!

One last pic just to show you Mountain View’s general outlook on life; this is called ‘Information Tree’…

More soon, miss you lots and wish you were all here with us!