
“Oh, wow! It’s hot, maybe I should take a break and have some water. No! I took a break two minutes ago, keep going. Don’t stop, the faster you walk, the quicker you’ll get there.”
For some reason on my backpacking trip to Thailand, my friends and I thought it would be a really unique and fun idea to take a three-day trek through the jungle about two hours outside Chiang Mai. As I hiked up the “baby” mountain, I was instantly regretting this decision. Only 30 minutes into the hike, I was drenched in sweat, I could feel the leeches that had crawled into the crevices of my hiking boots, and my 10 liter backpack suddenly felt like someone had packed it with bricks, “Did I really need to pack bottles of vodka?” There was no use for the voices in my head to answer, “because the answer is always to pack more vodka.” While I was free to complain to myself, I wouldn’t dare let any of my friends hear me. I was here to prove my friends and family at home wrong. I wasn’t just a princess; I could live on the strange food, sleep under the stars, and survive without my curling iron. After an hour of hiking, we finally arrived at the village we were to stay in for the night. But first, I had to take care of business; these leeches had to go. You would have thought someone was shot by how much blood there was. Leeches have a chemical in their saliva that prevents your blood from coagulating/clotting and scabbing. Some people bled for over an hour. But it wasn’t anything the vodka in my backpack couldn’t take our minds off of. Thank Buddha that I had brought the vodka.
For some reason on my backpacking trip to Thailand, my friends and I thought it would be a really unique and fun idea to take a three-day trek through the jungle about two hours outside Chiang Mai. As I hiked up the “baby” mountain, I was instantly regretting this decision. Only 30 minutes into the hike, I was drenched in sweat, I could feel the leeches that had crawled into the crevices of my hiking boots, and my 10 liter backpack suddenly felt like someone had packed it with bricks, “Did I really need to pack bottles of vodka?” There was no use for the voices in my head to answer, “because the answer is always to pack more vodka.” While I was free to complain to myself, I wouldn’t dare let any of my friends hear me. I was here to prove my friends and family at home wrong. I wasn’t just a princess; I could live on the strange food, sleep under the stars, and survive without my curling iron. After an hour of hiking, we finally arrived at the village we were to stay in for the night. But first, I had to take care of business; these leeches had to go. You would have thought someone was shot by how much blood there was. Leeches have a chemical in their saliva that prevents your blood from coagulating/clotting and scabbing. Some people bled for over an hour. But it wasn’t anything the vodka in my backpack couldn’t take our minds off of. Thank Buddha that I had brought the vodka.