We won’t go into the details of the intense “microbus” ride from Kathmandu, but six hours and one flat tire later, we were in the mountain town of Pokhara, the lakeside base from which backpackers venture off into the Himalayas for trekking.  The Annapurna Himalayan range lies just beyond the lake, and on a clear day several of the tallest peaks in the world are visible from the shore.  We’ve spent the last week here hiking around the lake and exploring several of the villages on the lower mountains in front of the Annapurna.  Earlier this week we covered about 20 kilometers in one day!  

          For the most part, we’ve been soaking up the natural beauty of this place and enjoying the clean air and open space.  Yesterday, however, we were out hiking again when we had an unexpected encounter along the jungle path with some of the local residents– leeches.  Shaped like the stem of a leaf, these little guys release an anesthetic that keeps you from feeling them as they latch onto you and start sucking blood.  As long as they’re left undisturbed, they’re completely harmless and fall off on their own after they’ve had their fill.  Chinese medicine would tell us that our blood has been purified by these helpful creatures, but the anti-clotting agent they release into your blood keeps the extraction site bleeding for the next 20 minutes to half an hour after they’re gone… and there’s just something inherently creepy about little blood-sucking worms that can sense movement and hunt you down in the jungle.  Yuck.

          Below is a slideshow of some of our wanderings in the area: