01/11/09 - Updated!

Rats, mice, fleas, bats, bed-bugs and leeches among other more pleasant creatures have played various parts in our story over the last 5 months...

As with any journey ours has been a mixture so far of people and places, of urban, marine and countryside, hot, very hot and cold (so far only kinda – bring ON Siberia in November!), food and drink, sleeping, waking, and waking-but-wishing-for sleep. So now that we're half way through our planned 10 months (ever changeable, funds and interest-levels permitting) it seems like a good time to recap on some of the more colourful details we've left out of our "What we've done/observed lately" ramblings. Since we've had some particularly close encounters with sections of the animal kingdom, it seems like a good one to start with:

Fleas

Animals were everywhere in Ethiopia – we saw herds of goats grazing on scraps of land in central Addis Abeba and being marched across 8-lane (albeit empty) intersections; sheep so skinny (and brown-haired) that I mistook them for more goats nibbled the yellow countryside to its rocky roots while waiting for the rains to make the grass grow again, and donkies, horses, mules and camels stood in for the bicycles, tuc-tucs, motos cars or lorries we later saw in other countries.

We came expecting the accompanying fleas. We were well warned: the guide book said to flea powder our socks for the crawling old carpets on Lalibella church floors, athough the only insects we found there buzzed annoyingly around our faces instead of our feet. In local country buses we wondered what might be jumping towards us from the dusty folds of white cotton or the thicker gabi blankets worn by our fellow passengers: it was often hard to get a cold shower in the cities, let alone some roadside village or rocky mountainside where the kids carried the day’s water in huge containers for kilometers.

So we weren’t surprised when we woke up one very cold morning in a tent on the side of a mountain, legs and upper bodies covered in bites! Convinced the crawling biting creature had stowed away in one of the hired sleeping bags we tormented ourselves, imagining hopping fleas inside our tent, rucksacks and the clothes we’d be in for the remaining 3 days of the trek. (To be fair to the organizers it was more likely to have come via the mule saddle I’d used as a fireside seat the night before…woops!) Either way, we couldn’t stop scratching. A freezing open air shower (it was 5’C or less that morning) suddenly was not an issu, and we drowned everything in the strongest DEET we had! But we stopped complaining pretty quickly - another couple in the camp had a much better story: they’d awoken in the dark to find a a snack-filled rat taking a nap in the corner of their tent! Hands down NO comparison – my WORST nightmare!

Mosquitoes

Ah but our foray with biting insects had only just begun: in the Tanzanian post-rainy-season tropics we entered the land of the Mosquito. The nightly routine, consisted of returning to base before dusk to cover up and apply vast quantities of DEET to any exposed skin before going anywhere. Before bed, with windows shut tightly, we headed quickly for the cacooned safety of our some-times-romantic, sometimes-fun-like-a-kids-garden-tent but mostly-plain-akward mosquito net and resumed the nightly custom of the inside-net-mosquito-hunt (the crafty creatures always found a way in) and relentless search for gaps or holes before we could settle down to sleep, checking we’d taken our malaria tablets and applying a final layor of DEET, just in case…

In Tanga, Liz informed us that the malaria-carrying mossies only feed between 2am and 4am. Instead of reducing my terror of catching the disease (we’d met someone on Safari who’d had it on Malarone, the extremely expensive new drug I was on for extra protection in Africa…!) provided a new focus for the fear during these hours, turning my inevitable night-time trips to the loo into dreaded, panicked dashes out and back to safety, killing anything I could hear buzzing with a sharp clap!

After the Tanzania the mossies were still present, and ever biting, but, with the probability of malaria greatly reduced, they were demoted to a simple, itchy annoyance.

Stew meets his nemesis

We’d have to have jammed our fingers in our ears for our entire stay in Tanga to avoid stories of others’ “near miss” animal encounters – anyone who’d been there around 2 or more years had a few tales to tell, from the hunt for a giant house-dwelling spider that ended with a hurley-wielding nun slaying a previously unnoticed lethal scorpion, to large snakes placed in hammocks and beds – typical local black magic…

These stories did nothing to placate Stew, who was already imagining snakes lying in wait in every tree and patch of long grass. So when I heard him laughing loudly one morning with our safari guide outside the park office I never would have guessed that he’d just come face to face with his nemesis: standing under a tree in the much peopled car-park he noticed a green branch above him moving suspiciously and called the guide over; when Omary started backing away quickly, eyes wide, all fears were confirmed – it turned out that the snake that had passed close over Stew’s head was none other than a green mamba, one of the most deadly, and territorial, snakes in all of Africa!

Furry Friends

In South East Asia the pests were a lot less dangerous but more ubiquitous in the densely populated cities of the tropics. The rubbish left out carelessly in Phnom Penh and Kuala Lumpur resulted in the largest black rats I’d ever seen hunching and munching, ugly thick tails on view, more than a little too close to our hostels for my own comfort.

I’ve always HATED rats, but I discovered a new irrational fear of their smaller cuter, cousins (thanks for the aggressive lab-mice stories Karen!) in Vinh, Vietnam when I met the permanent resident of our hotel room in the middle of the night as he sat munching on biscuit crumbs in the toilet’s bin! I blocked up every possible gap between room and bathroom before willing myself back to sleep, cursing my pea-sized bladder, mummified tightly in my sleep-sheet lest the mouse smelled the other food in our room and ended up crawling across my face while I slept. An inspection the following morning identified the entrance to Mr Resident’s den chewed into the side of the bath. It seemed too that every room must have had one such inhabitant – the same night, Barry had been awoken with scurrying and scratching sounds in between the walls of his room on the next floor.

Thinking that the staff really needed to know about the problem, I drew a little picture for the receptionist as we checked out, but my drawing and gestures were met with a few nods, a smile and some laughter… not quite the shock, horror and refunds I was expecting! So a few days later in another hotel in Hanoi, I wasn’t toooo surprised at the staff’s reaction to the RAT I’d spied running across a counter-top in the hotel kitchen after hearing it squeaking noisily through the open door:

“Ah, yes, there are many …. No, they are not dirty I think. So, would you like some breakfast?”

Crunchy Cockroaches

The more obvious citizens of tropical cities are of course cockroaches and we had our fair share of these too. Thankfully, the inch-and-a-half giant ones you’d see scurrying across the footpath in the evening or on the odd bathroom floor (and in one case landing in a glass of water, much to the delight of our fellow diners!) were, at least it seemed, solitary creatures, so we learned to ignore them quickly enough. The problems came with the smaller variety, which were much more social beings.

Thailand seemed to have a LOT of these. As our eyes grew accustomed to the semi-darkness in the Muai Thai arena in Bangkok we started to notice that the concrete steps we were sitting on were alive, literally crawling with tiny-to-medium sized insects, antennae twitching as they scuttled around in that uniquely disgusting manor of cockroaches everywhere. Later, in an overnight train from Bangkok on our journey to Koh Tao, Stew and I decided to rid the carriage of its roach population, smacking them dead with a Birkenstock-turned-roach-eliminator and a satisfying crunch! But this particular episode of MythBusters had an unwelcome result – apparently smelling their deceased relatives and feeling a little hungry, more and more appeared out of the woodwork until they surrounded our bunk, some attempting to pull the previous victims away to a more suitable dining place under other beds. When we noticed that the swelling population was concentrated around OUR bunk alone in the carriage, and that they’d now also started to climb up, crawling onto the bed and even across the pillow, enough was enough! The DEET and tiger balm came out: we sprayed and covered the bed and everything we were touching, then spread it on the ground to make an invisible protective barrier around our bunk. After a few anxious minutes in which we retched at the thought of them crawling on us, wondering if we’d get any sleep at all, we realized that it was working. Thank GOD.

So take heed: it’s not just an urban legend. NEVER kill a cockroach!

Eugh…. As I type this in what seems like a clean apartment in Siberia, (in WINTER – it’s 12’C below outside) I notice what looks suspiciously like a cockroach-cousin crawling on the countertop where I’ve just prepared some food… YUCK. Apparently they’re not just a tropical problem then…

Underwater hazards

Anyway… we got some sleep and made it to Koh Tao without further incident, eager to dive in the island’s crystal clear turquoise waters and excited about the sharks the island had obliged me with close-ups of 6 years before. Of course, we saw none, but neither had anyone else in the prior year. What the reefs did still have in abundance though was aggressive Titan Trigger Fish who, being exceptionally territorial, attack divers who enter their particular sphere’s with alarming frequency and enthusiasm. Incredibly, this behavior is apparently only observed around Koh Tao – we’d heard that they were docile in other parts of the world; certainly Jo, our instructor in Zanzibar couldn’t understand why we were so interested in them when we’d dived in Tanzania.

Every dive around the tiny Thai island was therefore spent with one eye on the lookout for the almost metre-long missile-shaped harpoon-immune muscle monstors. And quite a few swam, purposefully, and very close, by us, especially as it happened on our last dive, the very day after our guide had spent half an hour and half his air fighting one off, managing to escape with a torn fin and “a new found respect” for those mighty fish. Seeing one swimming directly at you, trigger fin spiked up, teeth bared is certainly scary, especially knowing what they’re capable of, but thankfully any time that happened we managed to exit their territory safely, swimming backwards, fins in front for protection, breath held and heart pounding!

In fact the only underwater incident that did occur I’ll blame on a momentary lapse in caution caused by minor nitrogen narcosis (hmmm…!) at a depth of 26m. Giddy on our first deep dive and my chance at underwater photography, I knelt on what I thought was the sea-bed (limited peripheral vision due to my mask) to steady myself to capture my fellow divers in action, and lept back up immediately in pain – 25 sea urchin quills sticking out of my knee! It was sore for days and the calcium remained under my skin for many weeks after – not something I’d recommend!

Pesky Monkies

 
Other unwitting tourists cause a cycle of animal hazards when it comes to monkies. The rule to be abided by is: DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS! In both India and Tanzania we had a number of fairly unpleasant encounters with monkies and baboons (who, unlike the lovely Ethiopian Gelada variety are VERY aggressive) chasing after us for our food.
Interestingly Mom told me that in our own lovely Dublin this summer swimmers were staying away from the Forty Foot because of nipping seals… Who was feeding THEM? Own up, and STOP FEEDING THEM! That’s my favorite swimming spot ruined :o(

The best for last - Parasites extract ridiculous quantities of blood in Malaysia
Bed bugs and leeches - To Be Continued...