Nemesis

You become accustomed to all things visceral and you certainly get used to the presence of creepy crawlies when you spend a lot of time in the tropics or where life is more lethal than in Cambridge. Not much perturbs you about death, bodily functions or most critters.

However, large spiders always cause a degree of wariness especially when they stalk your only toilet. It was a double whammy with big cockroaches skittering around the bedroom: my main nemesis to life in the tropics. The unnerving thing is that they don't run the opposite way like everything else. A combination of severe mould and a cockroach infestation (not unrelated) drove me from one apartment in Phnom Penh and I may never forget the sensation of having one between my flip flop and the sole of my foot when I walked through a heap of roadside garbage in Battambang. I don't know how such an unlikely creature has colonised so effectively.

A day of running around like a headless khawaja. Inordinate amounts of time spent negotiating over the price of field rations. Mental arithmetic skills are generally very poor, even amongst shopkeepers, which didn't help the bartering. In preparation for going bush tomorrow we reviewed objectives, sorted energy-giving snacks, counted camera traps (and checked some recent pictures from the project site - aardvark, elephant, leopard!), packed a million batteries, heaved sacks of lentils, pumped tyres, ensured I know what to do if DeeAnn (project partner from the US who has now arrived via Uganda) falls into a diabetic coma in the forest, loaded up on cigarette packets ('cakes') as bonuses for the field team, took a refreshing cold shower, and had a cheeky early evening gin and lemonade (tonic not available, gin smuggled in a water bottle) at a lakeside shack.

Because of what lurked nearby, I padded around and performed my ablutions gingerly for the remainder of the evening. Which was tiring as ablutions were being performed on somewhat of an urgent basis...