I Shared my Bed with a Spider

Remember how when I arrived in Samara, Costa Rica I was worried about all of the cracks and crevices in my bedroom that led directly outside, and relieved that my bed had a mosquito net to keep all of God's creatures out?  I haven’t encountered anymore mosquito nets since I left Costa Rica. There definitely wasn’t one on the bed I slept in when I stayed in Moyogalpa on Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. Moyogalpa is a pre-tourist-industry town, which means you don't pay a lot for your hotel and you get what you pay for.  It sounds kind of adventurous and cool right? Sure, it’s cool until you’re sitting on your bed at ten o’clock at night and out of the corner of your eye you see a very big spider crawling out from under the bed in a slow and purposeful way, like it owns the world and knows it. I’m not sure what it was - it was big and had a lot of hair.  Anything that has those characteristics  in this country to me is a tarantula and I don’t care to be more educated about it, so I’m going to call it a tarantula. Almost immediately after I saw it, the tarantula crawled under the door and went outside. What a relief. I figured that as long as it was outside and not in my room, I should be able to go to sleep and stay asleep.


That theory worked reasonably well for about 5 hours. I did wake up a few times, but refused to open my eyes for fear that the spider would be there (ignorance is such bliss when you are sharing your room with a spider). But at 3am, I woke again and did the unthinkable and glanced around. There in the corner of the room, directly above the head of the bed sat the tarantula. Some of you may be surprised to know that I actually considered leaving well enough alone, closing my eyes and just trying to ignore the fact that this spider was sitting there above my head, checking me out. I was dying to know how many hours I would have to lie to myself about the existence of this spider, so I reached for my alarm clock. The movement scared the spider and caused it to jump onto the bed, landing just above the pillows.

My tricky but ill advised plan of self-deception very quickly changed in the milli-second that it took me to get myself off of the bed and turn the light on. The spider was already halfway across the bed when I turned back around in a panic to see where it was.

The rest of the night the spider owned the bed. She checked out every corner very thoroughly. There was no other place in the room to sit so I had to wait for her to move to the back of the bed before I could at least sit down again. I watched bad TV for 3 hours keeping a watchful eye on said spider, until it was time to get ready for the volcano hike that I had arranged the previous day. To make matters a little bit worse, this little town doesn’t really have much in the way of breakfast options. I bought a little thing of coffee in a juice box (what a great invention) the day before so I at least would have some caffeine in me for the hike. So, I did the hike with no food and a little less sleep than I would have liked. I know, I know, you’re all dying to come join me here in Nicaragua after this story.

Needless to say that after I left Ometepe and arrived at my next destination (Masaya), I told the taxi driver I wanted a good hotel (forget Lonely Planet’s shoestring for a little while) and when I got there I thoroughly checked out two different rooms for signs of bugs before I agreed to take one of them.  Enjoy the pictures and sleep well for me.