Last night I was walking down the road to meet my friend for a beer down my local and I hear this incredibly loud “meeeeeeeeeeeeeeew” from somewhere in front of the Las Vistas tourist complex. So I go and investigate and it appears that there is a kitten inside the engine of a big 4×4, but when I called it, looking under, into, on top, and all around the car, the crying stopped. I wasn´t sure even that it was coming from that particular car. So I went on to the pub thinking, I will take a look again on my way back home later.

On the way back, I find a group of people standing around the car already and I thought, jeez, the kitten is STILL in there! There was a Spanish couple who were trying to help, but walked off wishing us good luck after I arrived, and an English couple (on their honeymoon!) who were writing a note to put on the car, which I then wrote in Spanish as well.

In the meantime, the kitten kept meowing and moving around inside the engine from left to right, and we were waiting for a police car to pass to see if they could do something. I also went to the petrol station on the other side of the road and asked the attendant there if he had any suggestions. He took one look at the car and said no way the kitten would have got in via the top if/when the hood was open, and it would most definitely have got into the engine from underneath, and when the engine was eventually started the cat would just come out. He had heard that story so many times, he told me. And when we finally flagged down a police car, they said the same thing, and also that they weren´t able to do anything….

So I go home to get a tin of tuna so we could coax it out, but when I got back the English guy told me that he had managed to undo something at the bottom of the car (and he said he did put it back after!) and a little white kitten shot out and ran down the road!

The next thing is, we hear the bloody thing mewing inside the engine of the next car!!!! The little git had simply climbed into there (a Renault Clio) with no problem, so at least we knew it could definitely get out again, and we could all go home and get some sleep (it was nearly 1am by then).

I bet the little munster kept people like us busy all night long – people passing, hearing its pitiful cries, stopping and trying to rescue it. I almost felt like leaving a note on the car saying “Do not rescue this kitten. It does not need rescuing. It can get out any time it wants. It is playing a bloody game with you!”

P.S.: Joke aside, apart from camping out there all night and playing this frightened kitten´s “game”, there wasn´t really much more we could do, and I´m positive somebody else who had more luck than us managed to get it out of the other car´s engine later that night and took it home with them…