Leech Attack

On our last day in Australia, Carleen and John (Brent’s sister and her partner) took us out on a hike in Ku-Ring-Gai National Park near their home in Hornsby (north of Sydney). It was a phenomenal, scenic, lush, beautiful hike and we had a wonderful time – it was the best send-off possible… well… maybe except for one small part.

After walking several kilometres, ooh-ing, and aahh-ing, and taking an annoying amount of photos, we began passing groups of hikers who all offered a brief warning – watch out for the leeches. Uh… hello… we’re in a forest, but, ok, thanks for the tip. I had been fascinated by the enormous ant hills all over Oz, and we reached a section of trail where the trees were thinner and it was more of a low (chest height), thick foliage. There were several of these ant skyscrapers, and it was our last day so I stopped to get a picture of them.

As I was bent down checking out the ant hills, I noticed a “twig” that was waving about sort of like it was searching for something. I realized that I was looking at a leech. Cool! We’d walked several kilometres without seeing one of these, and everyone seemed pretty excited about them, so I made sure to get a picture of him.

We kept walking, and soon, Carleen noticed that she had several of these guys crawling on her shoes and socks. Turned out Brent did, too. We stopped briefly and pulled a few leeches off and kept going. We could see them everywhere on the trail – sitting on the ground, waving about, searching for a shoe to attach to. For some reason – John speculated that it was the lighter coloured shoes, Carleen and Brent got more of them than he or I did.

That put a fairly quick end to picture-taking time and we decided to zoom through that section of trail. Every couple of minutes, Car or Brent would stop and do some leech removal, often requiring Brent’s help – these little guys can REALLY hang on. Once, when Car stopped, she dug around and discovered a leech had gotten into her sock and was firmly attached to her ankle. She commenced with the shrieking and dancing around that one does when they discover a leech inside their sock firmly attached to her ankle and yelled something that sounded like “Brent!Brent!Brent!Help!”. Brent ran over and performed a leech extraction, but since it had been completely attached on her, her ankle bled out for about a half hour after that.

We really kicked it into high gear after that – zooming down the trail, but compelled to stop occasionally to make sure we didn’t have any hangers-on that were getting dangerously close to pay-dirt.

Finally we reached a more open and dry section of trail (an old road) where we could stop and finish the leech removal. Seriously, these guys can REALLY hang on. You had to grab them, practically squishing them to get a grip, and tug like crazy. They seemed to have the ability to hang on with both ends, so sometimes you’d pull the end off that was stuck to your shoe or sock and the other end would swing around and grab on to you.

Because they could grab with both ends, they moved kind of like inch worms, crawling up… up… up… your shoe, sometimes stopping to try and attach to your sock, and sometimes getting more ambitious and finding their way inside the shoe (or in the case of Car’s “favourite”, inside a sock).

I had a lot of them on my shoes and some on my socks. Some of them were hiding out in the treads of my trail runners. I wasn’t very good at pulling them off, so I took to using a stick to try and pry them off.

In the final scene, our three terrorized heroes (Car, Brent and Rhonda… with John looking on in bemused impatience), danced around on the road flinging leeches in every direction… oh, but wait… somehow they can tell where you are (maybe smell?)… and each one of us had created a circle of leeches around us where we’d tossed them off, and in an almost coordinated fashion (or so it seemed), the armies of leeches circled and inch-worm creeped their way towards us trying for round two.

At the end of the hike, I thanked John for taking us out. He laughed because he thought I was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t. It had been a beautiful hike, and the stuff with the leeches… well, that’ll buff out… and it makes a great story!