Leech

With all the thoughts of Thailand floating through my head, and a thread on the CIN about phobias, I’m reminded unfortunately of the time I was in Thailand and faced my unknown fear head on.

We were traveling in Chiang Mai, we went on a horrible tour that was supposed to show us all kinds of neat things in the rain forest. The night before they had taken us on a “night safari” tour and we saw nothing, we barely saw the eyes of a scared elephant in front of us. Oh, and we saw a scorpion and we were all so excited to see something that we all jumped out of the jeep to take a look at the scorpion.

The next day we went on a tour in the rainforest, we saw a snake or two, but it was a pretty horrible tour. About halfway through I start to hear rumblings from the tour group, something was happening. I looked down to see what looked like worms basically standing straight up from the ground. Very quickly I found out these were not worms, they were leeches, tiny little leeches. They were so tiny that they could slither through the lace holes of my hiking boots.

I felt my throat tighten and the strong urge to cry. As I looked down to see them all over my calves and shoes, the tears started to flow. I could not handle this. Other trekkers were taking off their shoes and prying tiny little leeches out of their skin. When I took off my shoes I completely lost it and had to have my friend Christy pull them out for me. These were not Stand By Me leeches that you could grab with your hands, or burn, when we tried to burn them, the half outside melted but the other half was still inside. You had to pinch them, which made the blood they had sucked out gorge to the other side of their body and pull…hard.

I would have run out if I could have, leeches in front of me, leeches behind me. I’ve never been so scared, before or since.

Maybe I should re-think Thailand.