rtw with lucy

Before we left on this trip, we received many warnings from concerned family and friends–mainly the ones who were big fans of Steve Irwin and his show, “The Crocodile Hunter”.  Of course, Australia is known to have the most venomous snakes and spiders in the world, so we were a bit concerned ourselves, but figured that there are 20 million people alive down here, so it can’t be THAT bad.  Can it?

 So here’s the scoop on the deadlies:  haven’t seen any.  We did see some of the most poisonous snakes in the world, but they were at the Australia Zoo.  We saw the taipan and the death adder and the brown snake and several others.  The interesting thing about them is that they are somewhat opposite from our poisonous snakes, as are many other things down under.  For instance, almost all of the venomous snakes had a rounded head, rather than a diamond shaped head.  Their eyes were dark, so you couldn’t see whether they had slits for pupils or not–and really, who ever gets that close to a snake, much less one suspected of being poisonous?  Then the death snakes in Oz tend to have a solid pattern on them or nearly solid–not the big diamond shapes we see on our rattlesnakes.  We have been informed that the snakes around here are very shy, and you would have to be very unlucky to encounter one.  We’ve never gotten unlucky yet. 

 Another risk around here is the marine stingers, especially box jellyfish.  That one is simple.  If no one is swimming on the beach, we don’t either.  Not many have been spotted, but some have, and that seems to be enough for the locals, and enough for us too.  Erin and I shock easily so we really are careful.  There are lots of pools around here though, so we can cool off.

 So family and friends–relax.  We have no worries, but we’re not going to do anything dumb.  We did see a very big fish the other day, but he had absolutely no interest in tasting us!      Stephanie

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.