Crimes against youth hostelling: 2, not using the invisible red washing line and flooding the shower room
Risks of death from holiday activities: 4; poison, snakes, spiders, sunstroke
Additional fatal hazards: Ross River Fever, suffocation by dolly bushes
As if life in the forest wasn’t dangerous enough! We have been working on fairly level ground in moderate heat so far but now we were upping it a notch. We climbed into a gulley and were to form a line cutting down any pine trees we found on the way up. That makes it sound simple doesn’t it?
Ok then, let’s add some dangers. Did I mention that the gulley is filled with bracken fern between the trees as we are revisiting land where the pine plantation has gone and we’re clearing strays? Did I mention that long grass and the bracken fern equivalent is the des res of the local snake population? That it was breeding time for them and that they are at their most aggressive and territorial at this time? Did I mention that the gulley was also filled with what is known as “dolly bushes” which release a choking spray of airway-irritating dust whenever they are disturbed? How’s about we take the setting and make it a near vertical climb to the top of the gulley? What about if we put felled trees and unstable deadwood in between the bracken fern so that all you have to hang onto to get you to the top of the gulley is the pine trees that you are cutting down?
I know I do exaggerate sometimes but this was the hardest day’s work I’ve ever done. Trying to hold onto the tree that you’re cutting down whilst your saw is sliding off downhill and you try to grab it and your water bottle vanishes followed by your sandwiches and poison bottle and somehow you have to let go of your tree and scramble back down to get them and then make it back to your starting point. Of course I was out on my own and picking a safe path for the others which meant that at one point I fell right down a good few metres of gulley before I managed to grab onto a pine tree to save myself which gave me one of my many injuries – a bruised back and side. The others decided to try another route funnily enough.
So there I was, standing in snake central, in the mating period, trying to scramble up a sheer slope to get to the trunk of a pine tree.
As a rule, I’m not too worried by snakes. I’m happy to pass by them in the street and have had them crossing the grass in front of me whilst putting out the washing without a problem. This however was a snake on my patch, not me on a snake’s patch – completely different ball game. It all became very real to me though when I hacked my way through some bracken fern to get to my next victim and saw a snake head pop out of it’s burrow about ten centimetres from where I was about to work. With the words “all snakes in Tasmania are deadly” ringing in my ears I got the hell out of Dodge as quickly as I could and refused to work on my own for the rest of the day. Honestly, there’s nowhere to go when you see one and after that every piece of dead bark looks like one and every hole in a pile of wood looks like it might be a burrow. I was genuinely frightened for the next hour or so. It didn’t do anything to me – it was just curious and had popped it’s head out to see what all the vibrations were, it didn’t follow me or attack me or make any aggressive moves but just the closeness without any protection or a real understanding of their behaviour scared the pants of me. It made me wonder how many more of them were in the bracken fern with me right at that moment. I tell you, real fear is very different to doing extreme sports!
I think I also forgot to mention that as well as your tools, poison, water and sandwiches, you have to keep a bottle of insect repellent with you too as the mozzies around here carry the deadly infection Ross River Fever. Knowing from bitter experience that I am the take out of choice for the Aussie Mozzie population, I pretty much bathed in repellent twice a day and what I didn’t cover in repellent, I covered with jeans or two or three shirts thinking “no mozzie can get through all that”.
Yup, actually they could.
My left arm and elbow looks like a particularly challenging snow board run at the moment, covered in gnarly bumps – some of which are currently oozing puss – an added hazard you don’t see on Ski Sunday.
That’s not the worst of it – the other bites are on my bum. You can almost imagine the thoughts going through it’s little mozzie mind as it spotted my rear end bobbing about amongst the bracken fern. It got me through jeans, through my long-sleeved shirt over my jeans, through my checked shirt over that and finally through the anorak I had wrapped around my waist “in case it rains” (you can take the girl out of England...)
The position of said bites means I can truly say that my bum looks big in this, or rather, half of my bum looks big in this – like an old style inflatable mattress when you realise the reason you can’t pack it into the bag is that you’ve not deflated one of the pillows. Ouch! Sitting down right now is frankly no fun.
I can get through a plague of mozzie bites if I don’t scratch them. That’s rather like telling a kid who’s been through a sugar-free lent season and now finds himself in a sweetshop with a tenner to hand not to eat any sweets. They are just asking to be scratched, begging for it, there is nothing more that a big juicy mozzie bite wants in life than a big old scratching. “But” the voice of reason cries “you know they’ll swell up like golf balls, give off the kind of heat that makes nuclear power so popular in France and become twice as itchy to boot”. Ha! Too late! Oh god, my arm is now the size of a tree trunk and could potentially spark bush fires. My bum is getting to the point where it could file itself as an independent state – “Itchyville, Arseizona”.
The main problem for me with flies and mozzies is that, being veggie, I have kind of sworn off killing animals, so Al Capone style, I have to get other people to do it for me. I have to confess that there are a lot of mozzies now ‘sleeping with the fishes’ at my request. It has to be said that the Koreans demolish bugs in style though. We had a fly in the dorm one night and we were all being bugged by it – I opened a window to let it out – and another one flew in to join it! Thomas then got this great gadget out of his suitcase. It looked a bit like a tennis racquet but it gave a blue spark of electricity when swished through the air. The flies didn’t stand a chance! He then did the honourable thing and dumped their still fizzling corpses out onto the patio, next to the “DO NOT PUT LITTER HERE” sign. We couldn’t find the ‘CLEAN FLY CORPSES ONLY’ bin.
It was probably just as well that we were leaving shortly. The signs at the hostel were getting more and more aggressive (we were now at “FLOOD THIS AREA AGAIN AND YOU WILL SLEEP IN YOUR CAR”) and he had added to the charm of striding into the dorm at 7am and opening the curtains whilst some of us were sleeping / undressed by interrupting our evening meal to give us a telling off about flooding the shower. “Eric”, known to his English friends as Plastic Bag, the most smiley Korean lad ever, made the mistake of smiling to try to break the tension of the moment and was met with “Don’t smile at me young man, this is nothing to smile about” and a lecture on the structural damage that flooding could do to the building. Jamie then didn’t help by suggesting that if there was structural damage it was a symptom of a more fundamental problem than somebody not closing the shower curtain properly. Great, that helped with the tension releasing. I thought the vein on his forehead was definitely going to pop this time. The manager didn’t respond and vanished into the kitchen, probably to hit some guests.
Elsie
