mishaps, involving leeches

Jesse and I brought a first aid kit with us on the trip, but I honestly didn't think we'd ever use it. How wrong I was. We've actually run out of bandaids. We've both been burnt by motorbike exhaust pipes (Jesse twice). Not surprisingly, we've also had our fair share of welt-like bug bites, sunburn, and poison ivy (or something like it).

But by far the most interesting of all our mishaps was the one that occurred while we were staying in a national park in central Vietnam, hiking to some waterfalls. Towards the end of the day, I was sitting down admiring a really beautiful waterfall. When I stood up, I noticed a large amount of blood covering the front of my pants! I didn't feel any pain so couldn't figure out what it might be. I finally found a tiny spot on my leg that all the blood was coming from. And then I remembered that I had read that there were a lot of leeches in the park, and figured that must be it. We tried to stop the blood with layers and layers of gauze, but hours later, it was still bleeding as hard as ever!

At dinner, I asked one of the park tour guides about it and he said, no problem, he'd get me something to stop the bleeding. Jesse and I waited for him to come back with a tube of ointment, but instead, he showed up with a tree stump that was covered in orange hairy moss and started pulling some off. When I got back to the room, I covered the spots with the moss and within minutes the bleeding slowed down and then stopped. WIERD!