Donkeys, frogs and kitties, oh my!

Sleep is disturbed by the calls of animals at the Summit. The other day when stepping into the shower, bleary eyed and big haired I was shocked into life by the baying of donkey, causing an almost comical slip in the shower that wouldn’t look out of place in one of Adam Sandler movie.

Now the donkey has a habit of waking me up each day, alongside his friend the sheep. Apparently, he is housed in the compound behind the hotel and like the rooster you’d find on a British farm, he is your wake-up call.

Along with the donkey (who I swear has a vendetta against me and my sleep), I’ve recently been kept awake by a chorus of frogs. Every time they start their singing, I imagine Paul McCartney is stood in the garden of the Summit dressed as Paddington Bear conducting tiny frogs in a serenade to keep me awake. My room partner didn’t believe I could hear frogs, and so I started a campaign to find someone/anyone who could hear them too. When this wasn’t forthcoming, I began to wonder if the frogs were real or not or in fact had become a figment of my imagination. Clearly, I thought they were a manifestation of my worries of the small plane that I’m soon to board to cross a mountainous region. Turns out they are real and I was right. Win for me!

As a cat owner or perhaps more accurately a cat servant, any tiny little bundle of fur that mews at me automatically makes me crumble. Some woman get this gaga over small humans, but for me a kitty cat will make me coo in the way other woman do over a pram. At the hotel, there are two stray cats, who I’ve nicknamed ScruffBag who is a dirty looking slightly grumpy cat and then a beautiful kitty who looks to be part Bengal imaginatively name KittyCat. Now KittyCat knows how to work a room. She is like the Beyoncé of cats with a lot of sass and strong vocal chords. She comes and lays under your feet as you eat and emits a pitiful whine that of course means I need to share half my food with her. My need to mother this cat has lead me to research how much it would cost for me to get her back to the UK and even writing to my mother, who is lodging my cats Dee Dee and Charlie, to see if I could make it happy would she give her a home. Of course, this is a pipe dream, and KittyCat will live on at the Summit, working the floor and getting more gullible tourists to feed her. I will eventually return to my two overweight cats and remind them when they wake me at 5am for food that some cats don’t get one meal a day, let alone on demand.