I have been starting the day by visiting Phana Hospital for the past week. We have often heard that the hospital is somewhat plagued by monkeys but when we visit to count them we rarely see more than 4 or 5. But my early morning visits have given us a completely different picture. This morning, for instance, I was there at 7.15 am and saw 105. But I was not surprised because the previous evening at 6.15 (18.15) there were 153 monkeys there!

Here are some of the monkeys preparing to leave the hospital in the morning.

Next stop, then, was to go home and get Pensri to cycle with me back to the forest to lay down some rice for the monkeys. We were going to put it on a section of the Buddha Path which is likely to be the route monkeys returning from the hospital would take. We put the rice down at 8.15 and within minutes about 180 monkeys were feeding, and almost all of them came onto the path from the hospital side.

And then we went to the ‘temple’ building inside the northern gate where there is another troop which gets food from humans. They were outside on the road, but came in pretty quickly when they saw us laying down the rice.

On the way from the first feeding place to this second one, we came across lots of mushrooms / toadstools. The damp morning after light rain during the night must have been ideal for them.

This one is a stink horn. At first we didn’t realise that the ‘netting’ was part of the fungus.

We have not yet identified this one, but it looks a lot like a chapatti!

These were growing on dead wood and so they are seen much more commonly:

And these are common, too, but pretty all the same:

And finally, we came across this solitary puff-ball type:

And so to breakfast. But none of these fungi were disturbed, in case you were wondering. It was toast and boiled eggs for us.