In January, I was busy packing
for a holiday in Sri Lanka, when I noticed that some
of the latest new hatchings were doing their best to
stowaway in my suitcase. After days of systematically
removing them, I thought I was travelling with a chick-free
case. Of course I should have known better. These chicks
are more than a match for any mere mortal!
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I couldn't quite understand
why I could hear the sound of gentle snoring from the
vicinity of my spare pillow when I woke up on that first
morning of my holiday.
Then I opened my eyes fully
and looked across.
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For a while they kept a low
profile and didn't leave the room.
I noticed my supply of biscuits
and cashew nuts was dwindling and discovered they were
keeping bodies and souls together by having midnight
feasts at my expense.
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Of course it didn't take long.
These chicks are far too feisty to stay confined for
any length of time.
They first ventured onto the
hotel's Terrace, where they could get the lay of the
land.
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Unfortunately,
one chick stayed in the sun a bit too long. (There's always
one isn't there?!) He got so sunburnt that he lost all
his down and was forced to stay in the room for a couple
of days feeling sorry for himself until the rather violent
shade of red he'd turned had faded and the down grew back
in again.
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Once they'd seen the pool,
it was a foregone conclusion that they'd be in it.
One chick couldn't swim, but
a few lessons soon put that right.
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After that,
there was no holding them and a daily swim became the
routine.
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Followed by rest and relaxation.
Having learnt their lesson
about not staying in the sun for too long, they were
careful to take precautions.
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Naturally after
a strenuous few hours stretched out by the pool, appetites
were sharpened. Their confidence, by now sky high, the
bowls of cocktail mix on the Terrace tables beckoned.
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It was inevitable I suppose
that once they found the tables on the Terrace and the
food there, they were also going to come across the
drink.
The local spirit is called
arrack and when one of the guests misguidedly left his
glass unattended for a while, this is what happened.
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Unfortunately,
they developed a taste for it and the next thing I knew,
they'd made friends with Karu, who worked at the bar.
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Of course the
inevitable happened, they overdid things as usual and
ended up smashed out of their tiny minds.
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I wasn't exactly thrilled
to bits when they woke me up rolling back to the room
at 3 am singing the "Birdie" song at the tops
of their voices, but they paid the price the next morning.
Four very subdued chicks appeared,
hats low over their eyes and ears to shield them from
the bright lights and the general hubbub of the Terrace.
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Just as they thought the day
couldn't get any worse, Aruni presented them with the
bill for the previous night's dissipation. That knocked
them for six as they hadn't realised arrack came at
a price!
Not that they were daunted.
I discovered when I came to pay the extras at the end
of the stay, that they'd just charged it to my room!
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I thought I'd escaped from
them, temporarily at least, when I went on a day trip
to an Elephant Orphanage.
How wrong can you be?
They'd somehow managed to
hid in the car and when we stopped for a tea break en
route, it was to find the 4 of them perched on the shelf
behind the rear window. They'd even had the foresight
to bring a banana with them for their lunch.
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They were actually
no bother for once as, like everyone else, they were utterly
spellbound watching the elephants relaxing in the river
and there wasn't a chirp out of them.
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All good things
come to an end and after four weeks of heat and sunshine,
the return to the "frozen north" of England
came as quite a shock to their systems, but they'll have
plenty of stories to tell their grandchicks in the years
to come!
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