“Why Australia” seems to be the question that most people ask me. Currently, this is followed closely by, “Oh my god, it’s so hot there, aren’t you worried you’re going to get skin cancer?” And yes, I am vaguely worried about skin cancer, but from what I understand that won’t be rearing its ugly head for at least another 15 or so years, and like all good children of my generation, I intend to not think about it until exactly that moment, but more importantly, heat has nothing to do with skin cancer. So yes, while my pale ginger ass should be deeply concerned about the sun beating down on Australia and the amount of time I intend to spend deep-frying myself beneath its carcinogenic rays, I don’t think it much matters if it’s 110 or 60 Fahrenheit, or 15 or -1000 celsius, or however that works.
The thing is though, that no matter how much I am annoyed by the skin cancer/heat question, I at least have a strong opinion about the answer. I have no such strong opinion about the question of why. Which is truly absurd, given that I’m flying half-way around the world and spending thousands of dollars without being able to answer what seems like a very basic question. Why? The stock answer that I have been giving is that I’ve always wanted to visit since I was a kid. The truth behind that, however, is that I did a presentation when I was 6 or thereabouts on my perfect vacation, and for some reason chose Australia. This presentation was really just a ploy by the educational system to get me to research some foreign land, so I can only assume I must have looked at some pictures or visited a zoo or whatever it is that counts as research in a 6-year-old, but all that really stuck with me was kangaroos! And koalas! And I don’t think I’ve given Australia another thought since.
Given this, I’m not sure exactly how or why Australia popped out of my mouth last year. I think Europe seemed too cliched and South America and Asia quite frankly terrify me, and I am not nearly ballsy and/or suicidal enough to visit Africa or the Middle East on my own, so Australia it was. Once I’d said it a couple times I felt some severe societal pressure to commit, and now here I am, almost a year later, with a ticket and a backpack and, at this point, not much else.
I luckily realized before I got to Australia that I wasn’t much for the “ooh look a pretty building, now let us go back to the hostel and get wasted” school of backpacking, so I started looking in to WWOOF, which mocks me every time I have to say it with its absurd acronym. WWOOF stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms, although I swear that I some point I saw it as World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which sounds a little less collectivist and communist-y. The basic concept is that in exchange for a predetermined amount of work each day (usually between 4-6 hours), the WWOOFer is given room and board on some rustic, charming, organic, family-run farm. We’ll found out what the reality is. As with everything in this day of over-sharing and self-aggrandizement (I say with absolutely no sense of irony as I write what I fear is going to become a blog), you can find thousands of people online willing to talk about their WWOOFing experiences. They range from the idyllic (free spirits frolicking through the woods with birds singing to them and adorable animals bounding around their feet) to the barbaric (18 hour days of slave labor with nothing but gruel and a hard plank to sleep on). I can only assume that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The problem with WWOOFing in Australia, which I unfortunately realized a little belatedly, as in, after buying an insanely expensive and non-refundable plane ticket, is that most of these farms are out in the middle of the bush. Sounds great right? I want to be away from the cities, see how the real people live, get down and dirty and all earth-goddess-y and shit right? Well yes, I totally do. But you know what lives in the bush in Australia? What, in fact, owns the bush in Australia and just leases it out to the occasional human encroacher?
Every animal that wants to kill you.
I didn’t realize that this was the running joke about Australia until I had already committed to going there. Lesson learned - do your research on all the multitude of ways a country can knock you off before you decide to visit. There are snakes that want you dead, sharks that think you look tasty, kangaroos with razor claws and a chip on their shoulders, koalas jonesing for their next fix of sweet sweet eucalyptus, and even an adorable little octopus that is actually a glowing demon from the pits of hell. I’ve heard there are even plants that will straight up murder you if you look at them funny. However, I’m not that worried about most of these things. I won’t start shit with any animals, hopefully they won’t start shit with me.
But spiders are a different story, a story that should never be told lest you call attention to yourself and the little bastards come crawling out from the cracks around your nightmares and eat your soul. I don’t like spiders. I think all of them should be firebombed from the earth, with just a few left whole and put on little spider spikes and placed at strategic points to serve as a warning to any other spiders that start to get too uppity. Australia, in true Australian fashion, has some of the most dangerous spiders in the world. And not only are they dangerous, they’re huge. And not only are they huge and dripping in man-eating venom, but they tend to live near humans, in fact, in the very houses that are designed to keep nightmare creatures outside! Now, it’s not overly surprising that the multi-legged mutants live near humans, given that nothing can survive in 90% of Australia. And, in all fairness, the monsters that mostly come into houses are not of the deadly variety, just of the excruciatingly painful variety. But my brain and the entirety of my autonomic nervous system is not down with any of this rational thinking mumbo jumbo. I remember my parents telling me when I was a child that “the spiders are more scared of you than you are of them,” to which I reply, Bullshit. Big, steaming, heaping piles of pure bullshit. That demon spawn is the definition of abject terror, I refuse to believe that there’s anything going on in its little arachnid brain other than sheer amusement at my fear-paralysis.
So for some perverse reason that I will never understand, I haven’t been able to stop reading about spiders in Australia. In some masochistic, self-destructive way, I am drawn to the very thing that will be my undoing. See an article about “1 million reasons arachnophobes shouldn’t visit Australia?” Well obviously I have to read that, and stare in horror at the photos of spiders lurking in all sorts of harmless places until the image is indelibly burned into my soul and I am incapable of sitting on a toilet or putting on a shoe ever again. You know what else sounds like a great idea? Googling “spiders WWOOF Australia” and reading the first-hand accounts from battles on the front lines. Now I know that I can look forward to finding giant, hairy, JUMPING spiders in my blankets.
Yay.
In doing all this research, I have read that there hasn’t been a death from a spider bite in Australia since 1979, when antivenin was introduced for the second of two lethal spiders. But that doesn’t take into account that the spider won’t actually have to bite me to kill me. It will just have to appear, loping towards me like a smaller version of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I will keel over from a heart attack at the tender age of 28. I will probably piss myself in the process. It will be an ignoble death.
I’m going to look at hiking/work boots tonight. My top priority isn’t durability, or comfort, or water-proofness. It’s how effective they will be at crushing the life out of my nemesis, assuming that I don’t just run screaming from the room every time I see one. I’m hoping I can find a pair with a built-in flame thrower, just to even the playing field a little bit.
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