I can’t run up a hill on my bike, especially with all the luggage I’m carrying, so I always push my bike uphill.
Somewhere along the way, I developed a style of pushing my bike up hills.
With my right hand on the handlebars and my left arm on the handlebars and my forehead on my left arm, I could push the bike uphill with some ease.
Today was another long hill with no end in sight, so as usual I put my forehead on my arm and started to push the bike incessantly.
There was a small village and as I passed by the last building through the village, I suddenly felt a strange sensation in my calf.
It felt like someone had grabbed my calf with their hand.
I didn’t know what was happening for a moment as all I could see was the ground, but I reflexively raised my head and turned around to see a big white dog biting my calf.
“Gee, where did you come from?”
As soon as the dog met my eyes, he let go of his bite .
Immediately I threw my bike away and prepared myself for the second attack.
“Are you coming?”
As I prepared myself, the dog took a bite out of me, then turned and walked quietly back to the last building in the village and sat down as if nothing had happened.
Normally, when a dog attacks, it barks first so that you know it is there and can prepare yourself, but this dog that just bit me didn’t bark at all, it just came up behind me and bite me.
As soon as I realised that the dog was not going to make a second attack, I quickly rolled up my trousers, luckily it was cold around here and I had two layers of trousers on, so I thought
“it’s going to be OK”, but when I rolled them up, I was horrified to see that four fangs had gone through my trousers and I was bleeding from three of them.
“It’s bad, it’s too bad.”
From the moment the dog bites me, my forehead is sweating because of the fear of rabies.
Rabies is no longer a disease in Japan today, but it still kills many people in Asia.
Rabies is a horrible disease with a 100% mortality rate once it strikes.
The best way to treat rabies is to get the vaccine as soon as possible after a dog bite, before the disease starts.
I thought I was in over my head, and I was.
There was no hospital in the village of a few houses, of course, and the next town was 75 km away, so I got out the alcohol I had been given a long time ago to disinfect the wound.
The only thing I could do was to disinfect the wound, because I had heard that the rabies germ was contained in the saliva of the dog and could be transmitted through the wound.
All I could do was disinfect. “Damn it, I’ve been so careful with the dog!
Securing water
Into Tibet
Pass at 4300m
Keiichi Iwasaki Instagram