Rent to kill

He’s back. I heard him against last night : a dull “thump” just above my head as I was quietly reading in bed. That could have been a thief (Indonesians rarely come in football player size), but I knew this was just our free boarder, the luwak.

You could say luwak is a decently small animal, but the first time we heard about its existence we asked a waitress at our local pub what is its name in English. She had to consult some of her friends and came back with the answer : “That’s a wolf”. What??? A wolf living in our roof?????? Turns out, it is more like a racoon, and we find them everywhere in Jakarta.

Now we just have to find a way of getting rid of him. Again. We’ve tried though : hiring an exterminator company (“rent to kill”, how cute a name) that charged us a ridiculously high price to free our house of all its animals, from roaches to mosquitoes, ants and geckos. 700 000 rp for the fogging! Well, that translates as 70 dollars, but this is the type of price you never pay for anything here, save a plane ticket to Bali when you’ve been dumb enough not booking in advance to get a good price. Anyway.

The problem is, we live in the tropics. A place where during the rainy season, some plants can grow 5 inches within a month ; the papaya tree in the garden already tripled its height since we moved in, six months ago. So it is inevitable you will live with a lot of unwanted guests.

“Roaches you said? Buuuuurrrrck!”. You might assume that if Solenn is solely in charge of the cleaning, the place is just disgusting. You could have been right ; but as we were blessed by the amazing chance of being born in Western countries, here we can afford the services of Super Supi, who keeps the house so clean you are blinded by the reflection of the sun on the white floor/white ceiling/white walls. So you just have to live with a positive attitude, and think of the roaches and geckos as cat toys – those come free.

As for the luwak, this is another story. We have to contract another killer to assassinate him. If we’re lucky, we will soon post his picture on this blog.