Danny counted 169 bites on one leg alone the next day.In one way, I suppose, we were lucky. We got stung by wasps, bitten by ants and served as portable blood-banks for mosquitoes and blackfly. But however fast you went about your business (it was the best cure for constipation I’ve ever found), you were certain to find tell-tale lumps on your bum, or even more tender places, the next morning.Fair-skinned Danny came off worst. It was bad enough worrying about large animals roaming the forest, never mind unseen tarantulas or deadly snakes under your feet. Even with this sort of protection, and a mosquito net, we still got bitten.We drank only sparingly at supper. Drinking or eating heavily could mean the ordeal of padding out into the night jungle, armed only with a torch and a panga, neither of which was much good for fending off mosquitoes.
We covered our skins with raw Deet like teenage boys with their first bottle of after shave. At 20 per cent strength, it’s supposed to ward off British mozzies We used 100 per cent proof. Then there were the mosquitoes.We surrounded our sleeping bags with so many mosquito coils it looked as if we were trying to invoke some dark entity from a Dennis Wheatley book. Fireflies, blinking their mad Morse code to each other, were no problem.
Vampire bats flew, silent as death, through our ramshackle hut, but never sucked our blood. We quickly learned that we should not leave rods on the ground, and that fishing from our canoe in open water was generally safe (if you didn’t worry about the piranhas).At night, it was a very different matter. As dusk started to fall, all sorts of things with wings came out hunting. LIVING near a river means we acquire more than our share of insect- bites But I rarely complain. After my experience in the Ecuadorean rain forest, I vowed never to whine about stings and bites again.
During the two weeks we spent fruitlessly trying to catch giant arapaima from the river Tiputing I didn’t get attacked much but one of our party, a fair-skinned, freckled lad had the sort of epidermis that makes all biting insects go: “Yum!”
During the day it wasn’t too bad, though wasps stung you for the hell of it, and inch-long ants bit like pit bulls Even our native guide screamed when one of these took a nip. The PA man hesitated at No 7, then reported that the new signing had failed a late fitness test.QUOTE of the week comes from Bruce Rioch, the Bolton manager, on ITV: “We threw our dice into the ring and came up trumps.”. “We almost had to take the phones off the hook,” Mr Wilson said. “A surprising number of people were taken in by the spoof.” Fans at County’s game against Queen’s Park last week waited for the team announcement with bated breath. The piece explained that, through a little- known loophole in Fifa regulations, the fiery Frenchman was banned from playing anywhere in the world – except Scotland.
