Hooked on Travelling

Mongolia

My last sunset in Mongolia

…I am actually writing you this post from my home in Bristol, UK.  I got back from Mongolia two days ago via a rather overdue trip to the tropical diseases clinic in London in order to have a small community of uninvited parasitic squatters exorcised from my backside.  The good news for me was that what we initially suspected were tumbu fly larvae actually turned out to be canine hookworms.  I say good news, because when tumbu fly maggots set up camp in your butt cheeks you are left with only two options.   You must either wait the long, excruciatingly itchy weeks until they crawl out of their own accord in order to pupate, or you can coax them out prematurely using any one of a bizarre variety of available methods, one such vaseline-and-gaffer-tape inspired version that can be seen HERE being used by an unfortunate traveller in Panama dealing with an infestation of the closely related South American cousin of the tumbu fly, the bot fly.

As it turned out, evicting hookworms from beneath your skin is quite a simple procedure involving just a large, one-off dose of 6 pills that sorted them out in a matter of one day.  Thank you to the Tropical disease clinic in London for that, and no hard feelings to my lovely canine companion from our recent trip to Mali who faithfully accompanied me during my many long and lonely days sitting on a rock in Dogon county waiting to photograph the rains arriving, and who was most probably the unwitting originator of said hook worms.

Don't worry bouncer... I still love you

Tomorrow I am flying to Bangkok and then traveling overland to Laos in order to spend two weeks living and working on an island in the Mekong river.  No need for an additional pet passport as it turns out.

See you there!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 1:10 am. It is filed under Travel, View the complete Archive and tagged with Africa, Asia, BBC, BBC Earth, BBC Human Planet, blogsherpa, bot fly, dog, hook worm, hookworm, Human PLanet, Human Planet BBC, Mali, Mongolia, parasite, Planeta Humano, Timothy Allen, tropical disease, tumbu fly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.