Leeches and Mosquitoes

Leeches and mosquitoes are so smart.

Before this trip, I'd never encountered a leech. They were those things that I had heard about doctors using hundreds of years ago "to bleed people out." They are nasty little buggers.

First off, they look like innocent little worms. But they're not. They're after one thing: your blood! When they attach to your skin, they apply some kind numbing agent so you can't even feel that they're there. You won't even know that something's sucking your blood until you actually see them.

If you're lucky, they will only be on your clothes or your shoes and you can pick them off, but it is easier said than done. They just don't give up. They even fight to wiggle into the mesh of your shoes and they are real good at it.

One time I stopped on the trail to remove a leech from each shoe, only to see another leech fly from behind and attach to the back of my shoe again. How did they know that I was even there?
Does anyone know how they sense that blood is around? Body temperature?

Once a leech is on you sucking away, they put an anti-coagulant into the wound so that once you get them off, your blood won't clot. After I pulled one off my ankle (which you're really not supposed to do, you're supposed to put salt on it or burn it off---unfortunately our guide didn't have anything for us) it would not stop bleeding for a day! I was pretty freaked out, but I didn't have it a fraction as bad as 2 other volunteers on the hill hike; they had open-toe shoes (they were champions for even being able to make it up the mountain in the first place) and they got leeches inbetween their toes and on the bottoms of their feet! Disgusting.

Mosquitoes are pretty smart too, but not nearly so much as the leeches. They're kind of like Santa Claus in that "they know when you are sleeping, they know when you're awake." You can be lying there on your bed for awhile and just when you're about to sleep, you hear them buzzing in your ear. But it's not until those final moments when you're drifting off and you're so tired. And then you get stuck and just can't fall asleep for a few more hours.

The mosquitoes like me most, unfortunately, at the host family's house. It seems that I've worked some kind of truce with them at night so that they don't bother me so much anymore in my room, but I've basically surrendered to them if I'm outside in the evening. I'm wondering if my ankles and feet will ever look the same again.