by Joanna Wawrzyczek

This is the continued story of mouse trappers from Aberdeen Uni in Scotland.

Today I'm going to reveal to you what happened to us during the stay in our second destination - Ghorepani (in the Himalayas).

Let's start then. On the second day two of our four collaborators from The National Institute of Natural Sciences had to go back to Kathmandu because some problem had occurred in their organization.

Each day one of our traps on the agricultural site went missing. First we thought that the owner of the field might have been taking them as a fee for using his land. However, unbeknown to us he had aquired prior permission from one of our partners.

Soon after we discovered that choosing a jungle site could become an adventureous event. During one very cloudy day we had tried to find a coniferous forest, very well visible on clear days. Not only did we not find it but we also managed to get lost for a while. We learnt that navigating in monsoon weather can be very tricky indeed.

Twice a day for 8 days we were climbing Poon Hill (3200 m above the sea level) which is a popular view-point from which the highest peaks of Annapurna Range are visible. While climbing Poon Hill I got symptoms of mild altitude sickness and had to start Diamox treatment. Fortunately, it helped!

One of the worst things we experienced after diarrhea were leeches' attacks. On one of our trips to the jungle I got around 20 bites on each foot (lots of blood everywhere!!) which turned into an awful infection. Our host, Tara (a trained nurse) had to do a minor surgery of cutting the infected skin. It took weeks to heal, especially because everyday we had to put our wet socks and boots on for few hours to go to our sites. After our first bloody lessons with leeches we perfected our foot protection.  A few pairs of socks (leeches can easily go through one pair), some salt and wet tobacco turned out to be a good solution. Unfortunately it didn't protect us from bites on the neck, arms, back and armpits. We also observed that there are two kinds of leeches: the big and colourful ones and the tiny ones. While the big ones were more disgusting, we could only feel when the little ones where biting us. They could also hide everywhere which was very annoying when you are trying to de-leech your clothes and boots.

Two of our jungle sites were situated in bamboo growth – the favourite living place of black bears. These lovely mammals don't usually attack people, apart from for their protection. However, the locals told us about one fatal incident from last year involving a black bear and a tourist. Guess who lost... After this news, each time we were going to the jungle site we were shouting from far away to let the bears know that we were coming and give them time to get away with their youngsters. I can say that it was an interesting experience.

But that's not the end of our adventure in Ghorepani. After a little less than two weeks of  fieldwork our Nepalese partners decided that since we hadn’t found our mouse and there was no point in continuing trapping. They wanted us to quit our project and go back to Kathmandu with them to write a report, have a press conference about our findings and maybe go trapping somewhere else. However we decided to finish what we had started and agreed to in the first place.