I am literally a walking stick of candy floss wrapped in bacon
Industrious, vicious, relentless, and the size of birds – mosquitos in the Yukon are intrepid villains, seemingly programmed to insistently make my life a complete misery. As long as I’m around, getting their full attention, KP appears relatively fine, but even he has had a dozen bites on his head and hands since we started travelling through the northern swamps. Nothing is pleasant or easy when you’re fighting endless swarms of kamikaze cacti needles, and it’s really not that hard to believe that being admitted to a mental asylum after being exposed to such onslaughts could be on the cards. If you’re planning on adventuring towards the Arctic Circle in summer, and if you’re any bit as tasty as myself – bring a bee keeping suit, cover yourself head to toe in an impenetrable face mask, and if you have one, also bring your pet bat on holiday with you. You’ll have to buy her a treadmill when she gets home though.
It’s much hotter than expected in The Land of the Midnight Sun, and I understand now, why the sparrow-sized mosquitos are relentless in summer. There is no night. They never sleep, so they can feed on sumptuous visitors like me 24/7. They are like Blade – Daywalkers – and I am literally a walking stick of candy floss wrapped in bacon (I’m amazed I’ve not seen that at an American funfair!). The Yukon is beautiful, remote, vast and scarcely populated, and it isn’t hard to understand why. It’s an absolute pain! An itchy hell for the summer months, and one that freezes for another five. It goes into complete darkness for ten weeks a year and getting around is both expensive and time consuming. Oddly, I haven’t seen any bats.
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Ben Winston 