Day 338: In the swim of things

This morning we got up early to beat the heat for a quick swim. Afterwards, as we headed back to the hotel, I spotted a small snake on the path. Of course I couldn't resist picking it up, hearing locals calling out 'No!' from their houses as I did so. After having a bit of a look, I released it back into the grass beside the path, but we hung around for a little while to watch it move away as there was an old guy with a stick nearby and we were worried he might try to kill it.

Back in the room we had yesterday's leftovers for breakfast and then walked over to the supermarket to get some stuff for lunch, which we then ate in our room – tuna and cucumber sandwiches and a big hunk of 'mozzarella'. We've been staying in two rooms – a double and a twin - but the beds in the twin are pretty large, so we enquired about the possibility of all moving into that room, which would of course halve our accommodation costs. Thankfully, the owners were amenable, so we shifted all of our stuff over - and then we just hung around the hotel for the rest of the day. The girls went swimming and did some schoolwork while Kate and I did some more planning.

In the afternoon, I went back out and looked for flying lizards. Now that I've actually seen one, I'm desperate to see one fly, but although I spent a lot of time peering up at the tree on which we saw the lizards yesterday, and scanned all of the other trees in the vacant block, it was all in vain. I did see a few cool birds, however, and fed a lot of hungry mosquitoes.

Later in the afternoon we used Skype to call HSBC. We've been trying to change our mortgage, and the offer documents have been sent to us in Winchester, but we haven't been able to get hold of them, so we called to ask them to be sent to us at a hotel on the island of Penang in Malaysia. This process took so long that it was dark and raining heavily by the time we were done, so we just stayed in the room and had some more tuna and cucumber sandwiches (after Kate and Zoe walked over to the supermarket to get some more ingredients).