Well, I’ve not done much over the last couple of days. Mainly mope about, buy more DVDs and start to eat more. People have come and gone at the hostel, many of whom I’ll stay in touch with. This is a great way to travel if you’re sociable!

The hostel is suffering from a common trick at the moment as well. Taxi drivers are being paid a commission to take people wanting to come here to another building instead. This place is done up to look like the hostel, but when they get there, the “manager” comes out and apologises, saying they’ve double-booked but got the traveller room at another place.

The place they’ve been taken to is a front – there are no rooms there. It’s an office. I believe plans are afoot to legally get them to shut down. In the meantime, Max is looking to hire some large locals to meet travellers off the plane/train/bus and ensure they get to the right place.

One girl arrived last night who was taken to this other place, but she’d seen photographs of the hostel and knew she’d been taken for a ride. Basically, she started to walk off with the taxi driver screaming at her. She pointed to her map saying “want to go here. You have not taken me here, so I not pay. Goodbye.”

He caught her up and drove her to the right place. The question is, will he do it again?

The only other event of note was a little night-time visitor. One of the guys in the dorm was sneezing a lot which he put down to the aircon. Nodding off, he dropped his phrasebook down the side of his bed. As he went to retrieve it, he saw a pair of eyes staring back at him and freaked. “RAT!!!”

Close. One letter out. Cat.

The poor thing was petrified. Darted onto my bed, straight for the door, bounced of it as it was closed, onto his bed, somehow directly onto the bunk above, bounced off the closed window, clambered along the sill around the top of the window frame, into the bathroom and hid behind the toilet. From where it refused to come out.

We popped a little bit of food down for him/her and kept the bathroom door shut, as the guy who’d found the cat was very allergic. No harm, as it’s a tile floor and any mess could be cleaned up. Hopefully it would feel less threatened in the morning.

By morning it had gone. At around 4am there was an almighty CRASH. Kitty had climbed onto the bathroom door surround and managed to hoik out the entire extractor fan unit and fled through the hole. The cats here may look frail, but they seem to come with engineering qualifications.