Journals of a Hotel Manager

After a long day at work and a whole evening in my office trying to clear my 100million-th email, I came home to find a dark shadow running on the wall. I turned on the light to find a huge gecko in my room. I didn’t leave any window open so how the hell did it come inside? It was huge, must be 10 inches long, with a bulbous head and four large feet with bubble toes. It had beautiful coloring, I must admit, of bright green on dark brown.

I am not too afraid of the little lizards but I feel queasy about the geckos. They are certainly not as ferocious looking as the massive alu, but I have heard some pretty graphic stories about them.

It is said that geckos, despite their suction feet, tend to fall from trees sometimes. Once they fall on people, their first instinct is to bite onto whatever they land. We had an F&B guy, expat, here who had a gecko who bit into his neck after it had fallen down. Startled and obviously painful, he tried to pull the gecko off but the reptile latched on even more securely, resulting in a whole chunk of flesh missing and an ugly scar. Apparently the correct method is to splash cold water over the gecko to induce it to release its bite.

I was not about to suffer insomnia just to worry about if this gecko was going to fall on my face while I slept. So I rolled up a Condé Nast and tried to chase it out of the door. Surprisingly, this gecko was determined to make ‘mi casa su casa’. It ran further into the room and rested atop an air-conditioning unit, dangling its long tail provokingly on one side.

I got a bit upset so I found an umbrella and shoved it off its perch. Once on the tile floor, the gecko finally ran towards the door, but no! It went into my ficus pot. I ran to the plant and gave the terracotta pot a vicious kick, resulting in breaking the pot and spilling mud all over my living room. (Note to self: must call housekeeping and gardener to clean up and replace pot)

Now I was angry. I loved that pot and that ficus. It provided a soothing presence when I arrive home, unlike this creature on hand. I started to poke wildly into the dirt and surely enough the gecko couldn’t hide anymore. It crawled out, turned around and looked at me. I swear that it sneered at me and hissed. As I stomped my feet heavily on the ground - I was not about to squash it underfoot and have to scrape it up with Condé Nast - it eventually went through the door and back into the wild jungle night.

I shut the door and discovered that I had a sheen of cold sweat all over me. Time to get out of this xxxxing island. What’s next? In bed with a vegetarian crocodile?