A Very Surprised Gecko

I just spent the weekend at a little hotel in the village of Labadie on the north coast of Haiti. It is a small place, just a couple hundred people. Sunday was election day, and they were having the polling in the schoolhouse. To keep the peace, the U.N. sent soldiers out to all the highways and byways of Haiti. I saw a half dozen soldiers walking around the village. It is so remote that you must get there by a 10 minute boat-taxi. There are no cars there. So the soldiers came from all over the world-- Brazil, Chile, El Salvador-- to their barracks in places like St.-Marc, to be trucked or flown to another city, then to be ferried by boat to a village like Labadie.
The hotel is called Norm's Place. It is a set of beautiful little guest houses set in a tropical garden with lots of chairs and hammocks. Right by the beach, so you hear waves shushing on the shore the whole time you are there. A guaranteed stress-free vacation.
The bathroom in the room I had has a stone wall with ferns growing out of the cracks in the wall. It was so gorgeous, so tropical. I was brushing my teeth one morning, when I realized that a gecko tail was sticking out the overflow drain in the sink. As I watched it, I could see it was getting longer. He was backing out. So I watched as his hind legs, then his forelegs, then his head backed out of the hole. When he finally turned around and looked at me looking at him, he jumped! And took off running. I laughed and laughed.
The walls were stone, 10 or 12 feet high. The fourth wall, instead of stone, had woven cane for the top 4 or 5 feet. It was pleasant and open to the garden. I could hear the frogs singing all night long. And those waves.
On Sunday afternoon we took a boat to a nearby cove where there is a white sand beach and also, further out, a coral reef with lots of nice coral. I saw fan corals 3 or 4 feet high. I know there are bigger ones than that, but they are the biggest I ever saw. Also, I saw 2 big spiny lobsters, and I saw squids swimming for the first time. So fascinating.
On Monday morning I went to the Labadee resort run by the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. I was admitted as a guest and got to visit my friends from Pennsylvania, Terry and Becky Lawhead, who had come to Haiti on their first stop on a cruise that left Miami on Saturday. We spent the day together. What a great time.