A dose of Salts...: Things the Bite come out at night!

A few of you have asked where we’re staying so I thought I’d put some lovely pictures of the beautiful Eco Camp up for you to see.

This was our first camp deck next to the lake

The view from the viewing deck

The dining hall

The wonderful thing about it is that it’s totally open, there are no windows, there’s no electricity (we use a kerosene lamp in the dining hall after about 6.30pm when it gets dark), our drinking water is boiled rainwater, and all waste is carried off-site. The simplicity of this means that you get to see some awesome wildlife. Our regular daily visitors include oriental darters, hornbills, monitor lizards, a whole flipping army of squirrels (much to Janet’s chagrin!) from the giant squirrel to the pygmy squirrel, to flying squirrels, macaques, flying lizards, skinks….and more!

We call this little chap Scrat...he's always after our dinner!

At night, a whole new world emerges…we are visited most evenings near the dining hall by a cheeky palm civet and a malay civet who rustle about under the board walk. A Buffy Fish Owl can be heard and usually seen most evenings, and he’s just beautiful!

We are woken most nights by rustling, but you can’t always see what’s making the noise so we’ve recently taken to keeping a torch by our pillow, so in the last few nights we’ve been woken by a Malay badger (twice), a rare banded palm civet, and bearded pig….all which were right below our heads! Amazing!

Then there’s our bathroom….This is basically a toilet and sink surrounded by corrugated iron for our modesty, but nothing actually keeping the wildlife out.

We moved to camp deck 9 last week and to our fascination we discovered that we were sharing our bathroom with this giant chap (the photo probably doesn't do it justice...he’s about as big as Brodie’s outstretched hand!).

While we were fumbling for our cameras, I spooked him and he ran over the top of the fence, so we followed him round the back of the bathroom and to our excitement/horror we found he was being kept company by two more spiders (one equally big), a whiptail scorpion and a long-legged centipede (google it-it’s petrifying! Alas no photo as I was in mid-swing of a true Bridget Jones moment and was stood on the other end of the stick it was on so when I moved I simultaneously catapulted it in the air and it scurried off)…