Strange Bedfellows

The moment Percy walked into our room at the Mystic Waterfall Hostel in Yubeng Village she stuffed all our food in a sack and hung it from a rusty nail on the wall. Very mater-a-factly Percy stated, "could be rats" and left it at that. As a frequent backpacker I was all too familiar with treeing my food from bears, mountain goats, deer, and marmots, so her actions seemed so reasonable and obvious that neither of us thought to mention it to our fellow travelers.

That night, as Percy, Roy, and I each dimmed our headlamps and snuggled into our respective cots we were startled by an alarm piercing through the disjointed paper thin walls. "Something just ran over my head!!!" Doug called from the next room. "Ohh...It just ran over my feet!" cried Gail. For the next hour Percy, Roy, and I, tried to stifle our laughter as Doug, Gail, and James tried to trap the rat scurrying about their room. The traps were remarkably sophisticated given our location, resources, and the fact that they were constructed in near complete darkness, but the trio was ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to trap the rat and had to co-exist with it for three long nights.

Personally, I think the rat chose their room intentionally, not for the bananas they left on the counter, but because the rat in the Chinese Zodiac is emblematic of each of Doug, Gail, and James' good traits. Being the first sign of the Chinese Zodiac, rats are leaders, pioneers and conquerors. They are charming, passionate, charismatic, practical and hardworking. Rat people are endowed with great leadership skills and are perhaps the most organized and systematic of the twelve signs. Intelligent and cunning at the same time, rats are highly ambitious and strong-willed people. They are energetic and versatile and can usually find their way around obstacles, and adapt to various environments easily. That sounds about right.