Yeah, I know. Who has ever heard of leeches in the Himalayas? I certainly never have, and everybody I ever talked to about hiking in the Himalayas never has. Who would think that there are leeches in the Himalayas… but there are!
I started packing for my backpack/trekking/geology field work trip to the Himalayas about a week before I actually had to fly out from LAX. I was getting my backpack and camping gear ready, as well as packing all the other cloth and necessities for the travels through India that would be necessary just to get to the Himalayas and back. Going into a developing nation (Third World country) means taking into account a lot of things that you normally wouldn’t consider on a regular trip anywhere in the United States or Canada. Water purifier, iodine tablets, extra toilet paper, straws for soda bottles so you don’t have to use ice, powdered Gatorade, alcohol wipes for cleaning everything, well-stocked first aid kit, you get the picture. But I never in the world would have thought that I needed to take salt. Yet there it was in my kitchen cupboard staring at me and telling me to put it in my backpack. I know that sounds weird but that’s kind of what was going on. I had a set of those tiny little Morton salt and pepper shakers in my kitchen cupboard, and when I was looking through the cupboard for supplies, the tiny saltshaker kept standing out to me and I kept getting this impression “take the salt”. I can eat food without salt. I don’t want more weight and more junk to carry. “Take the salt” it kept coming back to me. “Why do I need salt?” I ask out loud, and then the answer came to me just as clear as a bell, just like someone standing next to me had said it, “leeches.”
Like any classical movie buff, I’ve seen The African Queen and I’m well aware of that famous scene near the end of the movie in the delta of Lake Victoria where Humphrey Bogart climbs out onto the deck of his ship and sees leeches all over him and start shouting, “get them off! Get them off!” And Katherine Hepburn grabs a big container of salt and start smearing the leeches with it and they fall right off. And then Bogart looks up into the camera and says with one of the most impressive, emotional pieces of acting that I think he’s ever done, “if there’s anything I hate… it’s leeches.” As I recall, Humphrey Bogart is quoted to have said about that movie, “I told them it would pay off to use real leeches”. But Katherine Hepburn had gobs of salt and all I had was that tiny little saltshaker. What good would that do? And everybody knows that the Himalayas are high, and cold, and above timberline, and austerely devoid of plants and animals including leeches. But I didn’t want to argue anymore. I’ve come to learn in my life that when that Voice speaks, do whatever it tells you. It always, always works out for your best. So I threw the tiny little saltshaker into my backpack and that was that. Such an odd reason to include in my backpack a tiny little item that turned out to be the most important item on my trip!
I remember specifically seeing the first leech on my boot. We were hiking up the Gori Ganga River to the base of the Milan Glacier on Nanda Devi, the highest Himalayan peak in India. We started from a little trekking resort village at the end of the paved road probably somewhere around 8000 feet, and we wound up four days later setting up a base camp at the glacial moraines somewhere around 14,500 feet. The trail at times was well constructed. It frequently wrapped along the side of the steep canyon wall with the wild river rushing below it, and I remember specifically one section of the trail that was put together with stones as if they were cobblestones. It was picturesque, lush and green with grasses covering the hillsides and wonderful to walk on. And I also remember that nice little section of the trail coming to a stop at a spot where you had to climb steeply up on the slick rocks and had to wrap around boulders on a surprisingly narrow little trail right on the edge of the cliff. All the time it was raining for at least half the day so everything was wet.
It was in the afternoon of the first day on a trail very similar to this that had collected shallow puddles through which we traipsed when a porter pointed out to me something on my boot. Most of the porters were barefoot or wearing flip-flops, and a few of them had decent sandals, so I can imagine they were pretty concerned about foot injuries in general. I couldn’t understand what he was saying to me but he kept pointing down to the seam of my boot and saying a word which I eventually understood to be “leech”. I looked down and I couldn’t see anything there and he kept pointing and saying “leech, leech”. Finally he used a stick and poked it, and it began to move and then I saw it. It was a bit like an earthworm about an inch and a half long, and the sneaky little booger had flattened itself out right in the seam of my boot so it was camouflaged and couldn’t be detected. I have no idea how the porters spotted it. We flicked it off with a stick and I thought nothing of it. I’ve had dealings with leeches before canoeing through lakes in Minnesota and Canada where they live in the shallow water around the shore, and if you make sure and stay clear of the water in this area you have no problem. The porter told me in broken English to stay out of the puddles, so okay, I continued hiking and avoided the puddles and that should have been that – only it wasn’t. I had no idea of what a bloody little mess these boogers were going to make of our camp that night!
Next week; “Bloody Little Mess!”