“In Pattaya, it is hookers. Here, it is treks,” a stranger said to me in a restaurant in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was an unusual pick-up line, but factually right on the money. Just as the beach-town of Pattaya was known for prostitution, the mountain town of Chiang Mai had become a mecca for travelers who want to “trek” through the hill tribe villages of northern Thailand. Trekkers claim to want to get a feel for indigenous people like the Hmong, Karen and Mien by sleeping in villages they get to by foot, elephant and raft.

I was one of them.

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I was walking through a ghost town with no ghosts. Maybe that’s why it never whispered any clear answers. Ancient Akrotiri was a city of 30-thousand souls, until they vanished, every last one of them.

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“It’s not contagious,” I repeated, as friends backed away from me in horror.

I couldn’t resist telling a travel tale involving skin-tunneling parasites. In turn, my friends couldn’t resist shifting back just a hair, although they insisted they understood there was no chance of worms leaping from my body to theirs. It didn’t help to explain that I wasn’t even sure I had schistosomiasis.

“Schi-what?”

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