Snuggling in Bed With Dracula

So, I get to this small village called Villeta right around 7 pm. It's already dark and I am absolutely wiped. The heat on the road has been almost unbearable and the day's elevation change totaled close to 1,800 meters (>5,700 feet). By the time I stumble into my motel room I'm a bit delirious. I immediately strip naked, run into the shower and let the cool water wash away all the grime and dirt I've picked up from the day's ride. I dry off and collapse on the bed face down, naked and exhausted. The room in pitch black.

By this point, there is a part of me that is absolutely starving and wants to go out to forage for food, but there is also an equally demanding part of me that says that what I really need is a good night's sleep. It is in this fog of indecision that I first hear what I can only describe as chirping or crackling right above my bed. At first, I'm not even sure the sound I am hearing is real. I am sort of going in and out of consciousness and the chirping/crackling is being drowned out by the sounds of salsa floating up from a couple of bars right below the motel.

And then, it happens. Twenty minutes later, still lying on my chest, butt-cheeks up in the air, in the pitch blackness of a Colombian motel room, something suddenly falls on my back. SMACK! CHIRP, CHIRP, CRACKLE, CRACKLE! I jump 10 feet in the air and reach for the light. Fifteen seconds later I record the following video. My apologies for erasing my 10-year-old girl screams.





POSTSCRIPT
Those of you who follow me via Twitter and Facebook know that after my initial bat-induced heart attack I decided to rent a separate room for the night. I didn't want to alert management because I feared they would just kill the poor critter. I had left the window open hoping that it would scamper out into the night. But I just didn't have the energy to move all of my stuff into the new room.

This morning I went back to the scene of the crime. At first it looked like my plan worked. I cautiously went through all of my things, one at a time. Everything checked out all right, until I looked inside my bike helmet. It's hard to see in this video, but believe me, it's in there.