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Ingrid and Marcel World Journey

The Blog for the famous Journey around the world of Ingrid and Marcel

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Archive for February 15th, 2011
These flies are driving me crazy. Small stupid bugging flies, which aim straight at your face/head, specifically its openings, i.e. nose, eyes, mouth and ears. No mosquitos though, although I must say I’m not sure which I would prefer. At least the mosquitos here leave your face alone and head for your legs. It’s really a funny thing I’ve been noticing since we’re on this side of the planet: Asian and Australian mosquitos don’t buzz around your head and bite you in the back of the neck or in the juicy place behind the ears like Canadian mosquitos do, they go for your feet and legs. Really it’s true, and I’ve been wondering what is with them. If anybody can give me a clue, please do.
Right now we’re both rather tired. It’s about a gazillion degrees and we got up at 5h00 this morning to go watch the sun rise over Uluru (formerly know as Ayer’s rock) and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas, a serie of massive rock formations about 35 km from Uluru). We watched the light come up on the horizon and reflect on the rocks and then headed out for a hike in the Valley of the Winds. After lunch we visited the cultural center where the aboriginal legends surrounding the area are explained, and now we’re kaputti and warmi. Oh yeah, we also have clothes on the line drying, which we will need to shake out well before puting them away because the washing machine was full of wings (the big bugs I took out before starting the wash). That’s another interesting phenomenon here, the wings. I think they are termites actually, and some places there are petazillions of them. If you happen to be driving, well, they crash into your windshield and the whole front of the car. Sometimes there are so many it sounds like rain, and then you can barely see out of the window. Or on the campground they get out at night and go crazy around the lights (typical bug-drug usage), and then they fall on the floor and die, and the ants come and get the corpses but leave the wings there. So when you walk there’s some “fluff” flying around,which is a pile of wings. And now you know why we’ll shake our clothes.
 

 

 

After meeting Nemo and Dora on the reef (I know, should write more about this once) and seeing the platypus on the tablelands, it was slowly time for us to move inland. So we got up one morning and set out for the long drive to the red center of Australia.
We had heard about a cyclone being on ist way and expected to hit the coast 4 days later, but as we drove away the forecast became more dramatic: this one was gaining force and was said to be the worst cyclone to hit Queensland since records are kept. Whole areas were being evacuated, even the whole hospital in Cairns was transferred to Brisbane by plane! On the radio there were messages to the population, telling people to barricade and make supplies of food and water, they were getting ready for an immense natural catastrophe. And we were thinking: oh my, were we lucky to leave the area before this! But this system was so big it did not slowly dissolve inland like a “standard” cyclone, from a strength 5 (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 meaning winds of around 300km/h) on the coast it kept on going west, still provoking massive rains and 150km/h winds over 500 km away from the coast. And the further away we drove, the further away the weather warnings were being issued….we had Yazi on our a….! So we kept on driving….not that there would be a lot to do between Cairns and Alice Springs, but this was an extra incentive to go west, because the storm was gaining terrain on us. Finally we reached Alice Springs, and then the storm passed….and went around the city. We are 2 lucky campers.