Malaysia has all kinds of weird and interesting bugs. Spiders
and cockroaches the size of your palm, geckos, beetles and unidentifiable
flying things. Dengue-carrying mosquitoes (more on that in a bit).
But, it seems, ants are ubiquitous throughout Southeast Asia.
They are literally everywhere. For a while there my house seemed to be made of
ants. Ants on the counter. Ants in the bathroom. Ants on the fruit. Ants in the
sealed oatmeal. Ants in the refrigerator. Ants in the laptop. My roommates and
I pulled it together, cleaned up all that we could, and used some wonderfully
high grade and, no doubt, harmful to human health, ant killer/bait.
The good news is that it worked. The bad news is that it
only worked for a time, and the ants appear to be finding new avenues of entry
into our house. We continue to use ant bait and we continue to keep them at bay.
In other words, we’ve won some battles, but definitely not the war. And now
that I’ve seen millions of ants in places other than Malaysia (that ant
infestation of my bags in Burma was a REAL gem), I’m beginning to think of it
as a sort of quagmire.
