New home, with geckos

Last Friday I moved just up the hill behind the Gump Station to a bungalow on private property, where I will be living for the next few months. It's a one-room building on a hillside, very airy, with 3 solid walls and one wall that is a bamboo curtain, separating the room from a little deck with a kitchenette and fantastic views of coconut palms, a mango tree, and the ocean. There's a mini-kitchen on the deck (sink and single burner stove), and a fridge inside, and a bed with a mosquito net (crucial!), and a table and two chairs. I've never lived anywhere quite this rustic before. I use an outhouse, there are chickens wandering about everywhere, and the entire property is protected by a pack of dogs, not all of which have learned to recognize me yet (I'm not sure if this is reassuring or not!). Every morning my deck is visited by common mynahs, which make a lot of noise, but don't seem to be stealing or disturbing anything.

The bungalow does, in one crucial respect, resemble something out of a childhood fantasy in that it is home to at least three species of lizard! When I unrolled the bamboo curtain on the day I moved in, I disturbed no fewer than four skinks; there are a half dozen geckos living on the ceiling and behind the cabinet; and I found a third, smaller brown gecko amongst the cutlery. Unlike most other lizards, geckos make chirping or barking noises. This is not too strange, but it is a bit weird getting used to hearing things rustling around on the table or behind the furniture. Apparently I will learn to hate geckos--they poop everywhere, so it's like having a small flock of birds in the house, and this is one of the reason people here own cats--but for the time being I am enjoying the novelty of it all. It brings back childhood memories of reading Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, in which he describes the geckos that lived in his family's house in Greece. I remember wishing I could live somewhere that had geckos inside the houses! Be careful what you wish for.

All has not been well, however, for the cold I got on Hiva Oa gave way to a really bad case of food poisoning on Sunday night. I'm not sure exactly what did it, but I guess it was the food I cooked for myself. I'm still feeling kind of weak from the fieldwork and two consecutive illnesses, but one funny thing did arise from spending all Monday lying in bed drinking carbonated beverages: the geckos apparently developed a taste for Sprite. I left the empty glass on my bedside table, and watched one gecko curiously climb inside and lick the liquid off the inside of the glass. It was joined by others. Initially it tried to scare the intruder off with some kind of threat display, but eventually it gave up. At one point there were six geckos on the table and adjacent part of the wall--three climbing onto or in the glass, one poking its head inside an empty Sprite can, and two others watching.