The Day the Ants Attacked

19 October 2008

What a day! I woke up at 4am after having a nightmare. As I crawl out of bed, Jonny asks me for the insect repellant because he thinks flies have been biting him all night. I turn on the light, and it turns out it was not flies, but ants. Thousands of them everywhere. They were all over our bed, walls, everything. They are called Singapore ants. They crawled up the extension cord that linked our car to a powered site. So, not wanting to sleep with a million ants, we got up and started the retaliation. We sprayed them and sprayed them.

We got on the road and headed for Hall’s Creek but had to stop every 30 minutes or so to kill a few more ants. We thought that turning on the air conditioning full blast would kill them, or at least put them to sleep, but it just made me really really cold. I dressed like a snowman in the middle of the desert.

We picked up our first hitchhiker today. A young man whose car broke down. He left his nana behind to wait with the car. We were only about 30 km from Hall’s Creek. He told us some pretty neat things:
Goana Lizard tastes like chicken
Dont cross paths with a willy-willy (a dust tornado), it’s bad luck
He told us why there are so many different coloured birds in Australia. It’s because All the birds were black and one had a big red ball on his foot. A white bird flew in and burst the ball. Colours flew everywhere and all the birds became different. There was one black bird who was hiding when the white bird came in, and that is why there are still some black birds.
Crows have learned to flip cane toads on their bellies to eat them. That way, they avoid the poisonous glands.
He wanted to know if it was true that people can’t get good sleep in the cities

Once in Hall’s Creek, we took a little detour to visit the China Wall and eat lunch. Because we won’t make it to China on this trip, it was a nice replacement for the real thing. It is much smaller than the real thing, but actually quite impressive in size for a quartz vein. We took photos and enjoyed ourselves.

We drove all the way to the Purnululu National Park. We had to drive through a deep bit of water, and I was filming. As I was filming, a piece of the camera fell in the water. It turns out it was just the little piece of plastix to hook the camera into the tripod, but we still fished around for it for half an hour. We’ll try and get a replacement in Darwin.

By the time we got to the campsite, it was dark. I had a tummy ache because of all the jumping around on the 4wd track. Jonny made a nice dinner, despite being constantly attacked by dim, blind and large junebugs.

Really looking forward to seeing the Bungle Bungle Range!

Marie-Claude

ps. The Wombat turned 370000km today! Happy Birthday mate!