Adventures in the Bush!

Well, an awful lot of bloggable stuff has happened since my last entry, and I've driven 15km to the only place with an internet connection to provide you lucky people with a quick summary!

We started our adventure in Sundown Park. It took three hours to get there, and I'm now pretty much immune to insects the size of my fist bouncing off the car windscreen, and needing to stop to let kangaroos and wallabies cross the road! Many of the roads arew dirt tracks, and provide a unique challenge when it rains for the little 2 wheel drive Hyundi vehicle that Julie lets me drive.

My time at Sundown was exciting, we went for a long walk up the gorge and saw a lot of wildlife, (huge iguanas - about 2m long!) But I never really settled down. There's so much stuff that bites, stings or generally harms, (iguanas secrete a nasty substance from their claws that infects any wounds they cause!) and I spent a lot of the time generally being a nervous wreck. We found A LOT of blood sucking, paralysis causing ticks crawling around the campsite, which didn't fill me with happiness!

We moved on to Bourabinda, another remote place in the middle of the Bush. I started to chill out, and even went looking for gems in the leech infested water, (apparently we all taste terrible, because no matter how much time we spent in the water, the leeches just ignored us.) Herds of horses, kangaroos and cattle roamed freely about the place, and it was truly beautiful. It was here I had my first run in with the infamous "funnel web" spider. The run in went like this: 3 of us sitting in the dark around a camp fire - spider runs around the fire, and between my legs - I exclaim, "isn't that a funnel web?" - Julie and Andy take one look at it and start pounding it with logs - this was in their own way, a "yes, boB... that was a funnel web."

At night turning on lights was a hazard as it basically meant that you were rammed repeatedly by large flying beetles. We played a couple of games of chess, but it was a test of concentration, and memory, as you tried to ignore being covered in beetles, and put the pieces that they knocked over back to where they came from. Dinner time was interesting, as we ate in low light, passing the torch like a condiment, to check your current mouthful for small beeltles. In the end I probably just ate a few, though I was particularly disturbed to drink a mouthful of wine, only to find I had a mouthful of beetle instead. Trying to spit it out resulted in it clinging to my top lip for dear life, before being cast into the fire... I spent the next day in town, away from insects, to recover...

More hazards were to come, as one of the stallions took a shine to Julie and would take to following her round where-ever she went. When I say that her and Andy woke up one morning to find a horse's head in their bed - please understand that we had not upset the local mafia, but that the horse had managed to prize the door of their van open to see Julie!

I've spent a lot of time fishing in the past few sites, but am yet to catch anything. I get a lot of bites, but they generally eat the bait off the hook before buggering off :)

Next destination was a turn of the century farm house - Waveridge Cottage. No electricity, but gas laterns and oil burners. The only anachronistic thing being the gas-powered fridge in the kitchen. Having hot water involved lighting a fire under the "Donkey Boiler" and waiting for it to get to temperature - although this did mean that I had my first bath for days! We went for a very long trek into the mountains, which was truly amazing, though a little scary as the area is still used for grazing cattle, and we would occaisionally turn a corner to find a herd of , (often horned) cows blocking our path. They generally ran off, but occaisionally we had to play chicken with them until they panicked and ran into the forest. I actually managed to go swimming in the lake outside the cottage - I even managed to stay in for about 10 mins, without freaking out in the murky, weedy water in the middle of Australia... We also went horseriding around the farm though only Andy had any real success, as Julie and I seemed to have communication difficulties with our horses! Andy hurt his back, so I've been doing a lot of the wood chopping, (I managed to press on despite the huge spiders scurrying away from the wood pile!) I had suffered a minor injury when a lump of wood flirted off and hit me in the face, but it merely adds to my grizzly outback appearance :D

Our most recent destination is the most civilized yet, the Nymboida Canoe center. We met a Swiss traveller on the site who was also interested in canoing, but didn't have enough cash to get a canoe and stay on the camp site with him. We paid his camp night, (equivalent of about four quid) and in exchange he taught us how to canoe properly! I spent a lot of the day upside down, being swept down the river and dragged along the rocks! I received a lot of injuries but I had a fantastic day!!

Anyway, I'm being charged about 4 quid an hour to use the net, so its time for me to sign off for now.

I'll do another post when we get back to Brisbane after Christmas!

Yours excitedly,

boB

Off on another big trip!

Today I'm off for a week of camping, followed by a week in a holiday cottage, followed by another week of camping.

I'm looking forward to it, (despite Julie's neighbours saying things like "The fact is that you will see something that could kill you whilst you're out there, but the chances that it decides to are pretty small")

I saw my first Possums last night, one ring tail scrabbling about on phone lines, and a mummy bushy-tail with a baby in its pouch!

Feeling quite at one with nature at the mo, there's a St Andrew's Cross spider and a Golden Orb spider in the back garden, they're both beautiful, (neither are dangerous, they just have painful bites - so I'm told... reluctant to try the theory out.) In actual fact there are only three types of spider in Queensland that have venom that is dangerous to humans, the legendary Redback, (it nearly killed someone in a Neighbours storyline once :P), the Funnel Web, (only the males are actually toxic enough to kill) and the Daddy Long Legs, but the Daddy Long Legs doesn't have the right type of fangs to inject its poison into a human, so only the first two are actually dangerous. I think that the fact that Ozzies call a type of spider a "Daddy Long Legs" is where Ricky Gervais got confused and thought that Crane Flies have poison. They're quite useful, as they prey on other spiders, including Redbacks.

Snakes are a different story, if you believe the locals: if it slithers, it can hurt you, run away!

When dawn breaks the parrots and other animals make it feel like I'm already in the middle of a jungle. It woke me up this morning, but it was a wonderful sound.

We spent all morning preparing to get on the road. We're a little behind schedule, but I'm all done now. Julie just had a bit of a shock whilst she was packing, when she reached into her sock drawer to find a gekko :D Again, they can't actually do any harm, but they keep the beetle and cockroach population down in the surrounding area, so the more the merrier!

In Oz!

I've endured the screaming children, the 8 hour flight with no movie or entertainment, (it was broken) a second 8 hour flight where the entertainment wasn't _quite_ as good as the other flight should have been, (London to Hong Kong should have been CSI, Hong Kong to Brisbane was CSI: Miami - oh the humanity!) But I am now finally here!

My flight from London to Hong Kong was pretty appauling, my screen was stuck on a channel that showed an unrelenting count down of how long you had left sitting on your ass in the plane. In the end I had to turn the screen away and turn the brightness down to escape the tedium. The staff were SHOCKINGLY bad. A word of advice - NEVER fly Cathay Pacific. They aren't even incompetant, incompetant mocks them, and looks at pictures of CP staff, to make themselves feel better. CP has its very own standard of appauling customer service... Cathay Pathetic. I was barged out of the way, had water spilled on me, had air hostesses listen to me patiently explain that my control was broken, only to claim to "go and fix it" never to return, (I toyed with the possibility that there was actually a killer hanging around the controls for my tv, using sabotage to lure them away, but who would want to harm CP staff... you know, other than anyone who's ever flown CP... ever.)

But after nearly three days on a plane I'm here!

I've already heard secadia betles, seen a huge number of fruit bats, had a Mo Po(spelt wrongly I think) fly at my head, (huge owl-like bird) and been out for a lovely Chinese meal with my sister and her boyfriend!

But for now I'm shattered, so I'm going to finish my glass of wine, and head to bed. We're off camping on Sunday, so unless there is an internet cafe I may not be able to blog for a while. I'll try to write down any thoughts and do a fill in when I get back.