When Leeches Attack: Gibbons in Thailand (Khao Yai, 2002)

These are mostly excerpts from a field journal I kept while working on a German project on white-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar) called “Genetic Structure of Thai Gibbon Groups at Mo Singto, Khao Yai National Park, Thailand”:

Tommaso –nice guy. Belgian mother, Italian father. Looks stereotypically European. Says ‘spam!’ a lot and talks about people getting smashed by cars.

There are monks everywhere. Monks eat only the food they are given during their morning rounds with basket in hand, once a day, although I have since seen monks sipping drinkable yogurt around 8pm here at Kao Yai…There are all sorts of rules associated with monks and nuns. Men cannot sit next to nuns and women cannot sit next to monks on buses, boats, etc…

First day in the forest of Khao Yai. Now I understand why the tourists (who we are not allowed to associate with) so often get lost and end up even more hopelessly lost when they stumble upon our gibbon trails…this is not going to be easy at all! First I must get used to the leeches, which are everywhere…and within the first minute of meeting Luca, he told me about his encounters with Malaysian sun bears – "…they attack when they see you and then that’s it, you’re dead." Tonight we watched the World Cup with a group of Thai men, who served us crickets—quite tasty, but I forgot to pull off the legs—at least the head was already off! 

Pak Chong—so this is where I’ll spend my time outside of Khao Yai—not incredibly exciting, but its true that you can find most things here if you know where to go. It’s hard to remember not to cross my legs in a way that my feet bottoms don’t face anybody!

See Group N—first day working with Adt, a Thai assistant. Group N’s home range is flatter than C’s –this is good, but of course the leeches are much worse here, especially up in the northern part of the range…Adt’s wife is pregnant (‘enormous’, as Tommaso likes to say)…Oh, how could I have forgotten to write about the biting ants? This night they invade my room…ants in my bed and all over the floor biting…Italians here have no sympathy because apparently the biting ants are sometimes even worse in Italy—I don’t believe it!

The gibbons generally stay very high in the canopy, so its tricky deciding when to and when not to wear my glasses. If its raining or damp (which is most of the time, although the worst of the rainy season is yet to come), they fog up…the electricity here goes off just about every night there is a rainstorm (which is just about every night), so now I write this by candle light…As a field assistant there is only so much information I am allowed to know about the project. I know some things, but will wait until I am in a different mood to reflect more intellectually on my experience here at Khao Yai. As for the gibbon groups there are six main study groups (A, B, C, N, R & T), as well as several neighboring groups that often have encounters with the study groups—some are known and habituated more than others…I don’t care what anyone else says, it is really very hard to clearly get a look at these gibbons’ genitals, which we have to do very closely each day to estimate the phase of swelling for the females.

…just heard several people sing (scream, really) ‘happy birthday’ in Thai and then a large gecko just snatched up a big moth – yey for geckos, which are everywhere – very noisy along with the toads that sleep in our shoes at night…I get hit in the head a lot (by falling fruits, discarded fruit shells, falling trees…) – its treacherous out there! Chution and others at WCS are studying the decline of the tiger population in Khao Yai by using as a proxy the increasing numbers and overall density of their prey species –hey, John Terborgh was right about the importance of and destructive consequences of the loss of top-down regulation! …while I would love to see a tiger or other large predator species at least from a safe distance, it is much more likely that I will be seriously injured one of these days by something falling too hard on my head or being stabbed too many times by one of those horrible trees that look like ferns with thorns on the underside…there are many nasty plants, though only 3-4 species to keep an eye out for…Barking deer really do bark. Loudly and all of the time. They are absolutely everywhere and many are tame, as are the much larger sambar deer (bigger than regular deer, while barking deer are a bit smaller and of course the mouse deer is even smaller—really small).

Today when we got back from the forest, Luca and Claudia and I drove over to the big waterfall (Haew Suwat) where ‘The Beach’ was filmed. Luca tells me that in Italy people banned the movie because it destroyed an island somewhere near here…apparently all of the forest scenes were filmed here at Khao Yai. I’ve seen several film crew here, usually shooting shampoo commercials by the Mo Singto Reservoir.

Lots of elephant ticks – they are BIG! Got one lodged in my abdomen, but definitely not as bad as deer ticks. Then here during the dry season the leeches disappear and the tiny ticks you can barely see come – make leeches sound wonderful! Ok, maybe not so wonderful after all. Today leeches were sucking blood from my head. They get all bloated and fill up with blood before falling off…this morning I ended up getting lost and ended up in this ‘very shitty area’ as Tommaso refers to it –is an area with a sun bear family and (tree) poachers living in it and is basically a big swamp filled with deep mud and many, so many spiny rattan and various other horrible spiny bushes that grab you and stab you (I was stabbed once through the head a few days ago). It turns out I had missed the sharp little UNMARKED turnoff that would have taken me to the appropriate night tree on trail NL. Instead I kept walking, not because I thought I was walking in the right direction or was anywhere near the male’s night tree, but because all I could think about was getting out of wherever I was…at this point I realized that several leeches (of which there were absolutely HUNDREDS in the crappy area, all of which were extra attracted to me since my boots and leech socks were still relatively new to the forest) had crawled to my neck, down my shirt, and at least two down my pants, not to mention the ones on my head, which I tried to ignore…

Again in the forest in an area with lots of leeches. Some are better than others—groups N and R live in the VERY leechy areas…I’ve decided that I don’t like leeches in my pants or in my eye (they drop in there from leaves when I am looking at gibbons) or in my ears (where they frequently crawl). I much prefer the big toads that live in our boots at night while we sleep. Leeches in the pants is definitely the worst and the way that you sometimes end up with leeches farther down your leg or even on your feet if the leech socks aren’t tied very tight around your other socks and pants leg. This generally happens if you either forget to tuck in your shirt or because you go to the bathroom in the forest and the leeches crawl onto your skin or pants leg.

Tommaso re-taught me how to drive a stick shift and how to drive a truck in Thailand. It wasn’t so difficult getting used to driving on the left side of the road, but here you must drive basically in the middle of the road, sort of straddling both sides of the line, which is fine until another car comes speeding by you from the other direction or comes from behind you to pass. Tommaso tells me that although you are supposed to pass some sort of a test to get a driver’s license in Thailand, all you really need to do is pay 500 baht and then you have it.

In the little book I keep with a few sentences to remind me of what I did each day, since I can’t possibly keep up with this journal on schedule, all I wrote for today was "ITCHY!”

At night the karaoke singers next door were loud as always. Almost every night this house next to ours is filled with Thai who sing karaoke. When they aren’t doing this they are singing this traditional Thai song that is one of the most monotonous things I have ever heard. Some evenings this tune will be played and/or sung over and over again all night, often past midnight and into the morning. Some mornings after karaoke  either at this place or at the tourist police, we will see people laying out on the grass, still a bit drunk from the night before…at the karaoke parties everyone drinks a lot of whiskey…Even though I ate crickets with him my first night here in Khao Yai, I made the accidental mistake of trying to shake Sombat’s hand when I introduced myself to him that night (not realizing that it is NOT ok for a woman to shake hands with a man)…he sort of leaped back in fright, and since that point we have had problems…at this point I hoped he wouldn’t try to kill me with a machete like Somlong tried to do when he left his wife, then girlfriend, for dead in he room where I slept (a whole other story).

Today in the forest I encountered the nasty little black hair splinter things that come shooting out at you from one of the various climber species like a magnet – I suddenly had about a hundred of these hairs on the palm/back side of my right hand. The worst part was that in addition to being very small and hard to remove (like cactus), these hairs carry the same poison that those really painful caterpillars carry, so its very painful…there is also some sort of a worm that stings a bit and often ends up crawling down my shirt…

Wondering if maybe I have some sort of intestinal parasite – how else can I explain the amount of food I eat every day?!...I do eat a lot of meat here – mostly pak priowan gai lat khao sai tung (‘sweet and sour chicken on rice in a bag to go’) since most people insist on adding meat of some sort to every dish. I’ve even eaten a bit of seafood/sweet and sour fish here and there, as well as a few crickets and cockroaches…Tommaso eats a lot of durian, fermented fish, and cockroaches.

Most men in Thailand become monks, at least for 24 hours to bring honor to their family when someone in the family dies or there is some other tragedy. There are also nuns—they also shave their heads, but walk around in white robes and aren’t as common as monks. One time Tommaso was trying to hitchhike to Pak Chong so he could get to a meeting in Bangkok and ended up taking a ride from a truckload of monks, who insisted on taking him to their temple. Finally he talked his way out of going to the temple, but not until he had been kidnapped by the monks for several hours. There are also many ex-criminals who become monks to avoid going to prison.

Tommaso is still gone in Bangkok...at this point I am having major problems with all three of the Thai assistants...later we discover that the main reason is that they see me as equal or below them because I am also just a field assistant (they don't know/care that I am working on a PhD just like Tommaso and I am female and younger than them)...things did get much better eventually...today I noticed that I definitely had some sort of tropical fungus between my toes...Last night Tommaso came back from Bangkok...turns out one of Tiang's problems was that I didn't realize that by 'you, stop!', he meant that he needed to go to the bathroom in the forest. Now he just rubs his tummy as a signal to indicate that this is what he wants to do!

Today on my way down a very steep slope I came face to face with one of those pit vipers Luca had warned me about. They stay just about at calf height, but I was moving down this mountain in the Group B territory, so I was literally face to face with the snake. It was bright green and luckily was totally asleep – and smiling!

Group N = LEECH HELL…leeches are much better today, but this morning in the dark I was stung by one of those very PAINFUL fuzzy caterpillars. My whole thumb went numb with pain…

RAIN. Lots of it. Lose Group N without finding the night tree. Today, though, there was some excitement as first 700 and later several hundred more pangolin (like big armadillos) were released at the Mo Singto Reservoir and further up the grassland…

Today I was surrounded by a pack of wild dog, quite frightening…I managed to find the female night tree on my own, which was rather exciting…First day off in eight days…the fungus between my toes continues…

taken of my kiwi friend josie in Indonesia,
not in Thailand, but my favorite leech photo!

Blue-green scorpions everywhere, especially on a trail and one just at the NG x DC crossing. In the forest alone again today – I actually find working this way much more productive, as I must rely entirely on myself…finish Group B on schedule – a miracle. Day off tomorrow, then will start Group N block #2. Termite invasion. As Tommaso says, “Here there is nothing much you can do – you have them, you keep them, you just piss them off a bit.”

Really getting tired of leeches on my head. Have a huge headache and two very infected leech bites on my left leg. Hope I can walk tomorrow!

...the next day I had to uit early and hobble off the mountain and drive back to the project house using my good leg. The "special doctor" at the pharmacy we went to in Pak Chong seemed to want to cut off my leg at one point, but he ended up just cutting the leg open with a knife and some needles to get out some of the infection. He was afraid that the wound had already abscessed past the skin and may have reached bone, so I was given a painful injection of antibiotics and several oral antibiotics and pain killers. I had to beg a lot, but eventually the doctors at the hospital gave us a week's worth of sterile equipment and bandages so we could open my leg to release the infection each day from the forest. I couldn't walk for over a week...one of my journal entries during this time reads, "Foot still bloated (3x normal size), but I can now walk..." The clinic doctor agreed that I could go back to the forest, but was afraid that the infection could fluctuate and so prescribed another round of oral antibiotics.

To make a long story short, after following gibbons for another week, I returned to the US, finished the second round of antibiotics, and the staph infection came back in my leg. I ended up in the Duke emergency room (only after putting up quite a fight in the emergency room and being forced to get a CT scan by a neurology resident) getting studied by the Duke infectious disease team, had an MRI and learned that nearly all of the soft tissue in my left leg was gone (so doctors were worried about osteomyelitis and were again discussing the possibility of amputation), became resistant to penicillin, and eventually improved. A year later the infection came back as a golf ball-sized lump in the back of my head. My very good friend and roommate agreed to open the lump with a sterile needle to relieve the infection, which was causing me a horrendous headache the night before my prelim exams in grad school. After passing the exam the next day, I went to the emergency room and went on another round of antibiotics. This  time they must have worked, since it has been eight years since I have had any signs of the infection. A few years ago I told this story to an American doctor in Western Borneo who said she is certain that I actually had necrotizing fasciitis and that the proper first response would have been amputation. All I know is whether near osteomyelitis or necrotizing fasciitis, I am happy to still have my left leg with no more than a single scar at one of the two sites where a very bloated leech had a long meal of my blood before eventually falling off and letting some really nasty bacteria enter the leg.

Back to my journal:

Last full day of following Group N. Tonight Tommaso tells me all about the fascinating Italian and Belgian version of the Boy/Girl Scouts. In Italy the boys and girls are mixed in camps where, as Tommaso says, a lot of ‘ticky tacky’ goes on…the Belgians are a whole different story—the boys and girls separate and there are attacks on other camps…when the boy groups attack other boy groups, someone usually ends up a flagpole and sometimes it can become violent. When boys attack girls they try to steal the prettiest girl and also underwear…they start everything by knocking down a tent and throwing some dishes…

And to summarize final story that only made it into my journal as an after thought: one day I went to the post office in Pak Chong to send some letters back to the US. All of the stamps have an image of the king on them and I didn’t know that you are supposed to use a wet sponge to moisten the back of the stamp before sticking it on the envelope rather than lick the back of the stamp, which is seen as a serious offense, since it is defiling the image of the king. I found this out the hard way when several armed men came towards me. A woman who spoke some English explained to me what was going on and said that the men were very angry and wanted to arrest me. Luckily I was able to talk myself out of the situation, but just barely!