Trouble In Paradise

It's not all rainbows and whales and fresh coconut milk out here. It's rural. It's tropical. And creepy crawlies are everywhere. The good news is, there are no snakes on any of the Hawaiian islands. But there are other creepy crawlies.

Let's start with the nice ones. Geckos. Geckos EVERYWHERE. They're cute. Zach loves to watch them, catch them, and carry them around.

He learned the hard way that they drop their tales when they think something's got them. And at night they chirp and chirp and chrip. "They're saying good night," says the boy. They're making a racket thinks the mama. And thank goodness for the net over our bed in the shed where we sleep, because they POOP EVERYWHERE. Each morning I wake and look at all of the gecko poop the net saved us from wearing. Our last trip here, I awoke to find hacted gecko eggs in my hair. Yes, a sleeping net is a good thing.

Then there are the poisonous centipedes. I was sitting on the porch reading when Zach came running up to me breathless asking for his bug box. Here it is honey, what did you find? "I don't know. It's like a giant worm but it's bright greeny-orangey and has like a million legs! It's so cool, I'll bring it to you." Noooooooooooooo! Don't touch it! That was close.

These little crab spiders (actually proper name is Asian Spiny Back spider) don't seem so scary, but they are insanely industrious builders. I wasn't able to catch it with my camera, but their webs stretch between any and all paralelle trees and seriously go up for 30 or more feet. It's not the high webs that get ya though. It's the low ones everywhere that you walk into and then furiously pull out of your nose and mouth and hair. It's now become Zach's job to walk the yard each morning with a long bamboo stick and clear the main paths of the crab spider webs.

But a stick was no match for our unwanted roommate. Ok, technically a cane spider won't hurt you, and they are even supposed to be shy around people, but would you want to room with this guy?

That's a big, fat NO. He had about a 6+ inch wing span and a wife. She had a big, juicy, egg sac hanging from her underside and was lingering in our bathroom. Game over. We called in Grandpa to evict the leggy family to the great outdoors.

That's life in the tropics. For every rainbow, there are 500 cockroaches (they don't even phase me anymore). For every whale breach, there's a swarm of centipedes. For every fresh coconut, there's a man-hand sized spider. It's the balance of nature.

Oh how I love our sleeping net.