This story happened while on the island, but totally warranted its own blog. So here we go:
The 2nd night Jessica and I were sleeping in the bungalows, I awoke to the crinkling of plastic bags around 4:30am. It sounded like something was getting into our food in our room! The night before Katherine and Gary had heard something in their food but just assumed it was probably the gecko lizards. I lay awake trying to convince myself that’s what is was. However, I couldn’t do that for long! The noises sounded too much like a bigger animal!
I began to get worried as we had slat windows that were open with now screens. There wasn’t a whole lot of room for something to come in but enough for a smaller sized animal like a cat or squirrel. As the noises continued I got worried and woke up Jessica. I was worried whatever it was would jump up on the bed and the mosquito net would not be enough to protect us. Thinking about this I made Jessica switch places with me because I was on the outside closest to it!
Now that we were both awake we debated what to do about our strange visitor. It was pitch black in the room and the only light we had was Jessica’s Ipod, which had unfortunately run out of batteries in the night. The big light wouldn’t come on in the morning till 8am when the power kicked back on, and the sun wasn’t coming up for at least another hour. Our headlamps were too close to the creature to risk grabbing. We laid in bed a little scared, praying some, and not knowing what to do.
We listened to this thing for about 30-45 minutes debating what it was. I wanted to make animal noises to see what is would respond to, but Jessica made a good point that we didn’t want to accidentally do a mating call and have it jump on the bed with us. Based on the noises it was making, digging into bags, the only logical thing we could come up with was a small monkey, which were present on the island according to Captain Ron. Finally, we heard the thing go back out the window and the plastic bag digging stop. We fell asleep for a couple more hours.
When we got up we asked Ron if it was possible we had a monkey in our room. He said it definitely was. So because of the excitement that our visitor could have been a monkey, Jessica and I came up with the crazy idea to bait it again the next night so that we could be ready with our flashlights and cameras. We made sure to leave the food readily available.
That night we got prepared. Took out our headlamps, cameras, and small pocket knife (for protection just in case the monkey didn’t like having it’s picture taken). I again made Jessica sleep on the edge closest to it. We fell asleep about 11
pm. I awoke to noises again at 12:30am. I immediately woke up Jess. However, the thought of catching this “monkey” was a little scarier in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t look as she turned the light on. However, she didn’t see anything.
We turned the light back off until the noises came again. Jessica tried to catch it again, but heard it run off again when the light came on. By this time we were pretty sure it wasn’t a monkey because there weren’t many places it could hide in our room. Finally the 3rd time was a charm as Jess caught a huge mouse/rat running under our bed! We totally freaked out even more praying that it couldn’t climb the walls or get into our mosquito net! That sucker kept us up most of the night as we would jump everytime we heard it moved around!
The next morning we totally regretted our “monkey trapping plan” and decided to get rid of the food or seal it up and close the window! I’ve learned my lesson in “monkey trapping” and probably wont mistake a rat for a monkey ever again!
