Rob and Anna's travel adventure

My View - India really bugs me (sometimes) [Rob's India Entry (#13)]

Had an interesting experience at one place we stayed at. The room we stayed in was very clean and modern, but was set in somewhat of a bushy area, and we were on the ground floor. This resulted in interactions with a record-number amount of local fauna.
The first encounter occurred when I went to pick something up from a chair. Along with my item, I grabbed one or two legs of a very large cockroach. It immediately began to struggle from my grip, which was somewhat startling and unnerving. The roach was about 1.5" (4 cm, maybe a little smaller) and full of life.
Next, the room contained many small ants. I'd estimate the ants to be 1 mm or less. There were two interesting features about these ants. One was that they were ALWAYS roaming around looking for food, and once found, a river of ants would develop. Any place that food was put (such as hanging on a clothesline in the middle of the room), the ants would eventually locate. Didn't matter too much how the food was wrapped up, they cut holes in plastic bags. The other, and more distressing feature of these ants is that they bit. I'd watch them, they'd walk on my skin for a bit (like 10 seconds), then stop, dive their head into by skin and bite. The bite hurt, not real bad, but you knew something was wrong. The real problem came from their size, 'marching', and biting. Several times they bit me in a very private area (sometimes at night), which honestly felt like an electric current! The sensation required immediate action. In general, there was also a persistent burning with the bite that would last a few minutes afterwards. Though we always sleep with a mosquito net, they mesh was too course to stop the ants. Several times they decided that the path they needed to take could be via the bed. Very annoying.
Of course the room contained the usual amount of mosquitoes, but the net makes that more or less a non-issue. Frequently we'd see one or two medium-sized jumping spiders, but that was also trivial.
It isn't uncommon to have a few geckos in our rooms, and this one was no exception. The geckos are quite inoffensive, interesting to watch, and hopefully are eating bugs. They are motionless for the longest time, and when they move, do so quite rapidly. This gives the appearance of suddenly appearing and disappearing.
The next form of animal life we discovered in the room appeared to be leaches in the bathroom area. They were black, soft, crawling, seemingly slimy and wet animals about 0.5" long moving about the bathroom along the floor. I could be wrong about them being leaches, but we were recently in an area known to have them, so it was a logical assumption.
The last thing in the room that really caught my attention was a special visitor to the bathroom, and was the motivation for this entry. For the first time in my life, I saw a centipede (at least one that I could clearly identify as such). What an interesting animal! I showed Anna, for the purposes of educating her to pay special attention in avoiding them. She took it upon herself to collect it for removal. She learned how fast all those legs could run! Not wanting to have anything to do with the possibility of being bit, I left her to harass it all over the bathroom. Quickly, it also did a disappearing trick and we never saw it again (was it still there- who knows?).
A little bit of research confirmed that most centipedes can inflict a poisonous and painful bite, that isn't of a serious nature. Some species in the tropics can be more dangerous, but no further explanation was given (thanks). Incidentally, we are about 8ฐ north, so we are definitely in the tropics.
Also in this town, we were privileged (?) to a multi-day celebration. All was good, we were somewhat honored guests (we got to know the family hosting the celebration), but the problem was that the noise (chanting, music, etc.) began about 6 am. It would resume in the evening, and go on to about 2 am. Unfortunately, we were extremely close to the stage, speakers, etc. We didn't have the most restful sleep there. So this was a different flavor of bugging.

posted by Rob and Anna @ 8:19 AM