How I cope with mosquitoes — blood-sucking bitches that love me

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By / March 11, 2024 / budget slow travel

Mosquitoes love me. My body is a natural repellent for anyone else in my vicinity because the blood-sucking bitches will feast on me before the ravenous females settle on anyone else. As I write this, I have five new mosquito bites from overnight while sleeping. Apparently a few got into our room when we opened the door. I have another five or six from being out and about last night. I wore light pants — but he mosquitoes bit through them! I’m not heat-tolerant enough to wear jeans in the humidity in southeastern India.

Since returning to India in December 2023, I’ve noticed the temperature is consistently five to nine degrees ‘higher than normal’ in southern India — from Kochi  and Goa on the western coast to Puducherry and Chennai on the eastern coast. Locals in all southern areas tell me mosquitoes are the worst they’ve ever been – especially in Chennai due to catastrophic flooding last winter.

Further north in India – in Pune – mosquito swarms swallowed neighborhoods. Argentina has tens of thousands of dengue cases because of mosquito swarms.

As we budget slow travelers in early retirement move around the ‘cheaper’ countries (some people call this this ‘geographic arbitrage’ or ‘geoarbitrage’), and as the world quickly heats up, mosquito issues will continue to get worse.

So what works against them? How can you protect yourself from the disease-carrying vectors?

How I cope with mosquitoes

In my experience: wind. That’s it. That is generally how I cope with mosquitoes. Wind is the only thing that has a 100% success rate. Wind grounds the blood suckers and prevents them from landing on me in the first place. But wind not a foolproof method in developing nations where power outages are a real thing. And outages can be a frequent real thing.

The Climate Clock is ticking down and the problem is only getting worse. The rest of this post has more about how I cope with mosquitoes after 8.5 years of world travel experience, mostly in ‘cheaper’ countries.

Mosquito coping methods

  1. Fans, wind
  2. Window screens
  3. Murder the mosquitoes
  4. Light-colored, long clothing
  5. Repellent lotions, zappers, nets

Wind & window screens

Without direct fan blasts, I would be a 5-foot-3.5-inch mosquito bump. And sometimes — like last night while sleeping — fans don’t even work. (Although I was not directly under the fan, so the wind stream isn’t as strong on my side of the bed.)

The next best thing: window screens. These are ubiquitous in the USA, but rare to non-existent in most of the right-priced Airbnb units we rent in developing nations. Puducherry had window screens and I hardly had any bites at all! Our current rental in Chennai has none. So it’s either open all windows during the day with fans, or keep everything closed and run the AC all day because it’s 93+ degrees plus high humidity that makes it feel like a wet 101. Ick.

Murder

Despite my natural aversion to murder of any type against any being, this option falls in the middle of my list — not the bottom. That’s because mosquitoes carry horrible viruses that can kill people.

Dengue kicked Theo’s ass in northern India. It took him literally months to fully recover. (I likely had a mild case of dengue but was never tested like Theo, who was so ill he nearly needed hospitalization.) Chikungunya kicked my ass in Mexico. To this day I still have occasional arthritic pain in my knees.

Theo is an unabashed Mosquito Slayer. His record for kills happened in Bodhgaya India, where the original Buddha became enlightened. The Buddha would have been aghast at the carnage in our hotel room. Despite a closed-up hotel room, they somehow got in and attacked us overnight. I woke up to several biting me at once all over my body. We are still baffled by that invasion.

I have a hard time killing anything myself – even mosquitoes. I try to live by the vipassana precepts and one is to not kill any living being. I will kill one – if I can catch the sucker. At my last vipassana meditation retreat in early 2024, I had a lengthy discussion about killing mosquitoes with the teacher. My view: killing a mosquito is better than the mosquito biting Theo, potentially putting his life in danger. The teacher told me to focus on the bodily sensations of meditation moments, and not worry about how things play out. The teacher agreed, however, that Theo’s life has more value than a mosquito.

Clothing & other various repellents

Clothing is a barrier to keep mosquitoes off — but only if the fabric is thick and dense enough where a stinger cannot slip through a teeny-tiny fabric hole. Most light clothing is filled with such holes, and so mosquitoes can bite you right through clothing. I cannot wear thick, heavy clothing like jeans in tropical climates home to the ‘cheap’ countries. I can hardly handle the heat and humidity half naked, even though my menopause hot flashes have greatly eased in the last couple of years.

I really don’t care to wear chemicals all over my skin, which don’t really work anyway. With that stuff blocking my pores, I sweat more and feel hotter. Most ‘natural’, ‘non-chemical’ repellents don’t work at all. Avon Skin-So-Soft does work for me – but only a little bit. There are also plug in repellents popular in India. But when you read the fine print, it says don’t use it in a closed room – keep a window for ventilation. Not possible when there are no window screens.

Mosquito zappers are like a physical repellent, and these are commonly sold. They help reach overhead where smart blood suckers try to evade your grasp. We currently don’t have one of those, but maybe I should pick one up.

Mosquito nets are another physical repellent to keep the bitches off of you. But unless you constantly run the AC, these fine nets block some fan wind and make me too hot. Plus, I get up often at night for the bathroom.

More about the blood-sucking bitches

Aedes aegypti carry terrible diseases: dengue, chikungunya, Zika, malaria, yellow fever. A blood-sucking bitch can lay up to 500 eggs in her lifetime, and the eggs can survive up to six months on a dry surface. These bitches will follow you into your home through the door – even if you think you’re being quick, you’re not quick enough for them to zip in over your head. They are sneaky bitches and they stalk you on the sly. They will wait for you to turn the fan off, then swoop in low when you aren’t looking. Yet when I’m trying to kill one, it can fly high out of reach. They like to land on dark surfaces for camouflage.

Aedes aegypti love to live around people. Trash collects water and that’s where they can easily lay eggs. The bitches are city slickers. In places like India and Mexico and many other tropical countries, litter is everywhere.

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Another nasty biter is the aedes albopictus, or Asian tiger mosquito. It basically carries the same diseases. It also has white stripes/dots on its legs, but instead of a U-shaped mark on its thorax, it has one single white line. They are generally found outside in more rural areas.

I think I saw a few aedes albopictus in the Lake Atitlan region of Guatemala (a file photo is pictured at the top of this page). Once mosquitoes are smooshed dead, it’s hard to tell them apart. Scientists say all these micro beasts have spread to higher latitudes and altitudes due to climate change, which is only getting worse. Locals at Lake Atitlan (5,000 feet elevation) told me mosquitoes were not an issue in that area until around the year 2010.

The Centers for Disease Control has great clear pictures on its website of aedes albopictus (rural dweller) and aedes agypti (city slicker – and much more common in my experience), plus a simple fact sheet about each. That page is here.

Don’t give up hope…

My late friend Tasso lived in the tropics for years. He told me I’d eventually build up a resistance to mosquitoes. To some extent, that proved to be true. Years ago, mosquito bites would itch so badly that I could hardly think of anything else besides not scratching myself raw. Today, the itch is mild to moderate and is usually gone in several hours instead of days.

Tasso also used to tell me, ‘If you can’t handle a few bug bites, you may as well go back to a cubicle.’ And that cubicle, my friends, is no place I want to be.

Thanks for reading, “How I cope with mosquitoes — blood-sucking bitches that love me.”

*Note: this is a heavily re-worked post that originally was published in November 2017.

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