GILI TRAWANGAN, LOMBOK, INDONESIA

For some reason, dogs are banned from the Gilis, but cats aren't, making this place total kitty nirvana! Of course, this means that whenever you sit down at a restaurant (which are all outdoors, and most of them have little raised platforms with pillows to sit on), one or more skinny little mewler will hop on up and start its sob story.

Being more of a "cat person," Chris is extremely susceptible to this sort of behavior, and since he usually orders fish, they're always right there beside him, just workin' it. Usually about half his dinner goes into some cat's belly--you'd think with all the tourists doing this (okay, myself included) that they'd all be fat by now, but most of the little beggars are pretty scrawny.

Adding to their pathetic look is the fact that nearly all of them have bizarre little crooked tails of varying lengths, or no tail at all. At first I thought they all must have been run over by cidomos or something, but then I realized that they couldn't all be that careless. One person I talked to had heard a rumor that the locals chop off their tails for good luck charms, but I don't buy that! I haven't seen anyone carrying around a cat's tail, and anyway Chris talked to one woman who said she's seen kittens born that way, so I think that's the more likely scenario--just lots of inbred mutant kitties! Must be an island thing, like all of those five-toed cats in Key West....