Being delicious

Apparently my legs are delicious.

In a tropical jungle area you expect to encounter a certain number of biting critters. Despite what the guidebooks say, you can't really avoid being bitten. Today at Annah Rais longhouse, up in the steamy jungle, the heat was murderous; we dripped sweat on the bamboo floor as we toured around the village in shorts and t-shirts. Long pants to protect us from hungry visitors were completely out of the question. We had applied near-pure Deet before leaving, but that didn't seem to deter the ants and flies that roamed our ankles when we stood still for too long.

Later in Kuching it was the same story. Kuching from the air looks like this:

Clearly, with all those rivers, mosquitos are going to be a thing. We're both on antimalarial drugs, and dengue isn't known to be in this region, so we can treat the buzzing ones as an annoyance rather than a threat. Still, after every stroll by the river, my legs swell up a little more; the hard part is to avoid scratching. In the tropical climate even small skin damages are slow to heal.