A Desperate Need to Complain

There are many things that can be said about Lima that are not particularly pleasant (intense air pollution, gross humidity, large amounts of litter and garbage, and so on), but one thing that is surprisingly pleasant (especially for the climate) is an odd lack of insects. It would now seem that this is due to the startling amounts of pollution, since we left the city for the day and went to a nearby town along one of the rivers flowing toward Lima. In this town there were plenty of bugs, including some sort of weird sand fly that is far worse than mosquitoes (at least the typically disease-free ones of my home town in BC. Granted I will admit that malaria or West Nile carrying mosquitoes would be worse). However, on a physical bite-bite comparison, these little critters are worse. Where mosquitoes just make little bumps, these guys take out chunks of skin (I'm not sure how they manage it, because they are really tiny). This leaves a small circular open wound, but they also must inject a similar anesthetic and anti-coagulating agent to mosquitoes because the area surrounding the wound gets all red and itchy. Scratching the incredibly itchy bites, however, leads to itchy, painful, and bleeding bites because they are already open wounds. Anyway, there wasn't much of a point to this post, other than to point out that my legs are unpleasantly itchy and sore this morning, and I'm not a fan.