Day 291: Changing rooms

We were awoken this morning at 6am by a persistently barking puppy and some anti-socially loud music. Last night, when we discovered that the place in which we were staying offered breakfast, we had cancelled our order at the visitor centre, but when Kate went up to enquire about getting something to eat, the owner said that his wife was away, so there wouldn't be any breakfast. She also enquired about the lack of any electricity in our bungalow – remedied by the flick of a switch (why hadn't it already been flicked?) - and the possibility of getting a lift into the village (no problem). By the time we were ready, however, he had 'lent his motorbike to someone else', so we had to make the two-kilometre walk to the visitor centre ourselves. This was no bad thing, as it meant that we got to see the rest of the village (essentially a collection of wooden shacks strung out along the road), until it began to rain, heavily. By that point, we had managed to get split up, and Zoe and I had all of the umbrellas, so Kate and Sarah were looking a bit bedraggled by the time we all met back up at the visitor centre for our breakfast of fried noodles and vegetables. 

After the morning's trials at the bungalow – and what we felt was an almost gleeful disregard for our comfort by the owner - we decided to see if we could switch to something closer to the village centre. It turned out that there were some more bungalows about 500 metres up the road, so we arranged to move there. We mentioned our decision to Sam and Laura and they decided to switch too and I walked back to the bungalows with them, where we repacked our bags and then got a lift back to the centre. We then walked to the Sun Bear bungalows, which were much nicer, much closer and, importantly, run by someone who was friendly, cheerful and clearly cared about making his guests comfortable and happy (he even provided us with a basic map of the area – something the visitor centre hadn't managed to do).

Armed with our map, we decided to take a walk to the rapids and waterfall that were located about half an hour up the road from the village, stopping at our old bungalow on the way to pick up the girls' MP3 players, which I had missed in the gloom when I was packing everything up. As we walked we were joined by Sam and Laura, who were also on their way to the waterfall. First, we all stopped at the rapids. With all of the recent rain in the area, the river was in full flow, creating an impressive maelstrom over the jagged rocks. We took our shoes off and had a bit of a circumspect paddle. We then walked a bit further up the road to where a more dramatic drop in the river's level had created a wide waterfall. Again, the current was very strong, but we managed to find a quiet, if shallow, area to get in for a refreshing swim. 

After stopping back at the bungalow, I walked up to the visitor centre to arrange an overnight rainforest trek for tomorrow. After I had signed up, I started chatting to Ramesh, an American computer scientist who had just finished his PhD. When Kate and the girls joined us, we all walked up the road to a small restaurant for a beer and a chat and then back to the centre for dinner.