My first night on the island of Ko Mook off the Andaman coast of Thailand was by no means pleasant. I arrived from a nearby island on a small long tail boat but unfortunately timed my landing with a seemingly endless stream of Chinese tourists. Despite racing ahead of the pack, I arrived at all the guesthouses along the beach to find that the Chinese group had advance booked every room.
Undeterred, I ventured away from the beach on a small dirt path inland. After a few minutes I entered a clearing with six rustic cabins and one main building set along the jungles edge. I seemed to be the only one around, so after wandering in and out of the main building a few times hoping someone would see me, I popped into the kitchen and surprised a tiny old Thai woman cooking her family’s dinner. After the initial shock of discovering a six foot foreigner in her kitchen, she greeted me with a smile and led me to a sign-in book and a key to one of the small cabins. The cabins were cute and simple with a queen bed draped with mosquito netting and an attached bathroom. It was getting late, and I didn’t feel like navigating the dirt path in the dark, so I decided to get some sleep early and have a productive first morning on the island.
Unfortunately I hadn’t counted on the relentless artillery barrage which would make sleep oh so elusive. I’m of course talking about the monkeys. My cute wood cabin sported a thin sheet metal roof, and I’m not sure how long it took the monkeys in the area to realize what a coconut dropped from a tree would do to a tin metal roof, but they sure were aware by now. Every five or ten minutes, just enough time to start to fall asleep, a coconut would come crashing down onto my roof from the trees above. BAM!…5 minutes later…BAM!
This massive explosion would be followed by what my untrained ears took for laughter amongst the plethora of monkeys scattered in the tree tops above. For hours on end this barrage continued, and sleep was by no means an accessible goal. Much later into the night, as the parade of coconuts began to wane, I was blessed with a new sound….the scurry of an animal along the wood floor of my cabin.
The prospect of jungle rodents invading my space was even less enjoyable than the coconut bombardment. I kept very quiet, and sure enough, every couple of minutes there was an unmistakable little shuffle of feet. My lack of sleep was really kicking in by this point, and I told myself that the mosquito netting surrounding me would stop whatever rodent this was from climbing into the bed during the night. That bit of self comfort, however unrealistic, was what I needed to tell myself and I soon passed out.
I awoke to a pleasant morning with the sun’s rays diving through the cracks of the cabin walls. About a minute passed before I remembered that there was an animal running around my bed the night before. I tensed up and tentatively crawled to the end of my bed and looked around the floor for any sign of the pesky critter. All clear. I then army crawled back up to my pillow and leaned across the bed to check the side floor and the the rest of the main cabin area. All clear again. I relaxed, the mystery animal, which I guessed was some sort of large jungle rat, must have headed back into the foliage at daybreak. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, glanced down to push myself up and had the most frightening experience of my life.
Staring up at me from the side of the mattress, right next to my left leg, were two bright red eyes. I jumped backwards and screamed like a frightened child. I just about fell off the opposite side of the bed, but caught myself, and was now standing on the far corner of the mattress with a slight twitch, not daring to take my eyes off that spot. After I stopped shaking, I peered across the bed and found, a little to my dismay, that this was not a terrifying jungle monster, but instead, a mammoth spotted gecko clinging to the side of the mattress and looking directly back at me. After a thirty second staring contest the lizard leaped off the mattress and galloped into the connecting bathroom. I say galloped because until now I had only seen geckos that were a few inches long. This one was easily over a foot. I gave chase, desperate not to lose the image of this great beast that caused me so much fear, and luckily snapped a quick picture before he breached the top of the bathroom wall. It took me a good hour to finally get my heart rate back to normal.
I’m not sure there’s any moral to this story, but the closest one I could think of is that should you ever find yourself in the jungle and hear a scurry, don’t just assume it’s an ill tempered rodent. It may just be a colossal gecko bodyguard, eating all the insects that are actually trying to do you harm. Oh, and steer clear of metal roofed lodging in the jungle. Monkeys are annoying.