January 23, 2007
When Steve (Kiwi friend/ travel partner) and I finally left the gathering it was dark.  We tried to hitchhike for a few minutes but it wasn’t working.  Luckily the shop owner let us set up a tent in his back yard.  In the morning we were going to try again but a group of rainbows were getting a truck to Ranong.  And they were going to an island: Ko Panyam.  Cool all we wanted was an island.  So we tagged along.
I will say I was expecting to sleep, read and hang out on the beach.  It sort of freaked me out when they bought a bunch of food and asked everyone for $.  Then there was talk of a major beach cleaning project, building bungalows and raising goats.  In the end it was all good.  Of course that was after I went in to my "Alice doesn’t feel like she does enough, but doesn’t feel motivated to do a major beach cleaning project" phase.
We stayed for two nights and three days then parted ways, no goats yet.  There was an unexpected visitor.  The first night I was exhausted.  I woke up to something on my leg but the fog of sleep was still thick.  It felt hard like claws or a shell but also soft like flesh.  My imagination going wild I swatted it off.  I truly thought it was a crab probably because I heard a story from another traveler of crabs in their bungalow.  Then I remembered the fleshy feeling and thought it was a lizard.  It was way to big to be a gecko so it was probably a tookay.  Those are the ones that bite and don’t let go.  I woke Steve up but I don’t think he believed me and I couldn’t see it with my flashlight so we went back to sleep.  Then Steve woke up to something on his leg, see I wasn’t hallucinating.  He couldn’t sleep until he found it and when he did he told me it was a mouse, well a big mouse.  So there was a rat in our bed.  He didn’t want to tell me because he thought I would be afraid (as I had told him the neutrino story from St. Bernard’s Parish).  The next night I heard something again and this time I saw it.  Amazingly enough it is a big mouse.  It looked a lot more like a mouse than a rat with silky fur and round ears, but it was bigger, but not as big as a rat.  Who knows.