Hi all,
I realise it's been a while since I last posted on here but the work i've been doing has been keeping me in the office til 6 or 7 at night and then eating out with friends seems to take up the rest of my time! Anyway, there's not much to report other than to tell you about what happened to me last night...
After a lovely dinner with Tibetan friends at the Tibetan Children's Village (set up to house and educate orphans and refugees arriving from Tibet), I returned back to my room to be confronted by an enormous spider on my ceiling. Most people will know that I am prone to exaggerating the size of spiders in the UK, but to be honest that's because they don't come that big. In this instance i'm really not exaggerating, that spider was huge. I'm not sure what the definition of a Tarantula is but it certainly looked like one to me.
So my first thought was just to sleep on a chair outside for the night, seeing as there was no way I could stay with it in my room. But then I remembered all the things that creep around here at night (a leopard killed the hotel owner's dog a couple of weeks ago) so I decided the problem would need to be tackled head on. But not by me of course, i'm terrified of spiders. I waited for one of my neighbours to come home and asked him how he was at dealing with spiders. The poor guy should've just lied. He came into my room to check out the spider in question and confirmed that it was indeed a huge bugger. So given that you don't tend to have things like a large glass and a sturdy peice of cardboard at hand when you're travelling I grabbed a small bucket from the loo and a brush (a collection of twigs wrapped together). As he tried to brush it into the bucket it decided to fall from the ceiling on to my bed and straight into a pile of laundry (clean, thankfully).
So the next stage was for this poor French guy to pick up each piece of clothing in turn and shake it. Including my underwear. Yes, it was embarrassing. After getting to the bottom of the pile and not finding the critter we realised it had made itself comfortable and did not want to leave. So this time i grabbed a long stick and we went through the pile again. When i got to a dark pair of trousers (which had already been picked up and turned over a couple of times), a hard shake produced a tarantula which promptly ran across the floor. French guy managed to get the bucket over it so the next stage was just to manouevre it out the room. Phew, breathe.
So by sliding a flattened carrier bag under the bucket and turning it upside down we thought we were home and dry. In fact, feeling cocky we decided to have a look at it once we'd got it under a light on the balcony. It was as we were discussing how best to uncover the bucket that i noticed the spider was merrily sat ON TOP of the carrier bag which was supposed to be covering the bucket and was sat right between the poor guy's hands! I screamed and ran. He screamed, dropped the bucket and ran. After a few minutes we saw that the poor spider had crawled to safety on the balcony rail and was probably wetting itself laughing at what a pair of wusses had dealt with it!
I was still laughing hours later, just wish I'd managed to get a photo of the spider before it got away! Although hopefully i won't encounter another one in my last week and a half here in India. xx
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