The outback is out to get me: part 1

(The alternative title for this post was 'Survival: Outback' but I'm pretty sure CBS actually did film a season out here, now that I think about it.)

A few weeks before Australia, I decided that it would be a wise idea to familiarize myself with the wild dangers of the outback. This mostly consisted of me watching YouTube videos of fire ants taking down megafauna and orb weavers devouring small birds.

So I wasn't particularly well-informed, but I knew that 1) Australia no longer has any natural predators and 2) it would be winter, and thus most scary things like the taipan snake would be inactive.

I felt pretty safe, and decided not to dwell on the potentially life-threatening stuff (read: ignorance is bliss). This was relatively easy to do, with the amazing scenery and back-breaking work to distract me. The wee little carbonates, the cute kangaroos, the adorable parrots—this place was totally harmless.


That's when I kneeled onto a bed of thorns.  Jon heard my first curse word of the season (he's keeping a count, just how I am with kangaroos).  There were a bunch of three-pronged prickley things stuck to my pants—"little f*cklets" they've been nicknamed.  While I was picking them off, one managed to prick me good and deep in the thumb.

So the outback drew first blood. And it would take more. I suffered a few more f*cklets in my fingers, and soon got my fair share of rock shrapnel to the face (the warning on the rock hammer telling you to wear safety goggles is not joking), but other than that I felt pretty unimpressed with the supposed threatening nature of the outback that I had always heard about.

So I guess nature felt offended and was determined to live up to its reputation when I decided to stand on an anthill at Mount Goddard.

Of course, I didn't know it was an anthill.  To me, it looked like a really shallow mound with very few bits of rock debris on it, therefore the perfect place to stand and think very long and very deeply about my Brunton.

For I was deep in the midst of hating on my compass for pointing south instead of north. All of my bedding plane measurements on the hill were off by 180 degrees, which wasn't that big of a deal but still slightly annoying.  No wonder none of my numbers had made any sense, since the sun was that-a-way and that way was clearly an east-ish direction and 264 degrees is not an east-ish heading at all and—

Wow, those are some really big ants. Tthere's a lot of them too.  I wonder why—

And that's when the longer string of cursing started. Where once the cursing count lagged way behind the kangaroo count, the gap was now closing very, very quickly.

It goes without saying that I had ants in my pants.  These weren't the small, itty bitty ones from home though—they were fat and quite large, bodies perhaps a centimeter or two in length sprouting with beady black heads and legs. They swarmed over my hiking boots, burrowing their heads into my socks while others began crawling up the length of my pants.  It was a sight I never thought I'd ever see—60+ ants trying to take me down.

I jumped my way towards Jon screaming "ANTS ANTS ANTS!!" among other things, putting my defective Brunton to good use by using it as an ants scraper on my boots and socks.  To make matters worse, the ants began to bite ("ow" would be an understatement). Jon looked at me incredulously at first, especially as I snatched the measuring stick out of his hands to make good use of that too, but soon began to help after realizing just how many ants were on me.

After a good thirty seconds of trying to de-antsify, I had no other choice but to de-pantsify, so I ran to the other side of the hill and promptly stripped to my knickers.  Needless to say, relief ensued.

At this point, I could practically hear Jon grinning over at the other side of the hill. With as much snarkiness as is expected of a Harvard alum, he said, "So, you got ants in your pants?"

To be continued with part 2 in which I have a run-in spiders.