Save the Kitty - pleeease!

It must be summer holidays in Europe, and somebody has been telling those Europeans about our little island (Kapas)! So instead of the place being practically deserted like it was last year during Ramadhan, it's crawling with pasty and sunburnt bodies (not something we are used to here).

Poor Zai has had his idyllic lifestyle rudely interrupted - he complains to us that when he gets up in the morning and comes outside (around 8 am or later) his restaurant is full of Europeans demanding breakfast. He no longer has time to flop around in the ocean making sea-shell jewellery or sit around watching his freshly-caught squid drying in the sun.

But for us, it meant moving to another resort (just down the beach a bit). This place looks like Lisa (our hippie almost-daughter-in-law) has already been here, it's definitely where she belongs.

It's difficult to photograph with all the bits and pieces hanging everywhere, and the shady open restaurant with wooden floors and clean wooden tables. They have some sort of a special deal where people can stay there as "staff", and so there always a number of keen helpers around to serve in the restaurant.

We didn't actually stay there, we booked one of the new cabins in another resort through Hans, the chap running the European place, but that sort of gave us the run of both resorts.

 In between this new resort where we were staying, and the European "Kapas Beach Chalet" resort is another locally-run resort called "Mak Cik Gemuk" - and of course it is all closed up and locked for Ramadhan.

When we first moved into our chalet we could hear a cat yowling - nothing new there, this place has lots of cats, none of them specifically 'owned' by anyone but generally friendly and often adopted (or else they adopt people).

This expectant puss, for example, was trying to keep cool in the restaurant and looked quite well-fed and happy.

But the crying cat near our cabin continued all day and into the evening. When we finally paid attention, we realised there was a mother cat - we could see her prowling around heavily in milk - and a young kitten somewhere calling pitifully.

We soon discovered a locked bathroom in the closed resort where the kitten was trapped, but when we asked around we were told simple "no key". So all night the little kritter cried (without becoming weaker as we had thought it would) and the mother prowled around.

In the morning in the restaurant they asked if we had slept well, and we mentioned the kitten. One of the European girls was immediately concerned - she was quite familiar with the mother cat and knew where its nest was with the second kitten.

They tried putting the desperate mother cat into the bathroom where its baby was, thinking they could then chuck food in there for her until the owner returned, but she was unwilling to jump down into the room. Despite being unwilling to break the lock or damage someone else's property, they decided to remove a sheet of roofing.

When the chap got the roofing off and looked inside he was very surprised to see that the tiny kitten was actually in the toilet bowl in the bathroom - no wonder it hadn't become weak from dehydration, and maybe that was also why mother cat wouldn't go down to it.

Well, he lifted the kitten out, and gave it back to its waiting mother. She sniffed at it suspiciously, and it immediately started to run off wildly on other adventures until she bopped it on the nose and put it back in its place.

It was a relief for all of us.