This country is trying to kill me

"It's hot. It's dry...very dry. Practically everything that's not poisonous is venomous. But it's the best bloody place in the world, all right?"*

I was browsing through some old photos when I came across this:

That, my friends, is an enormous spider trapped between the screen and the glass of the window. I have no idea how it got there, but I spent that entire day staring at it, petrified that if I looked away it would disappear to somewhere inside the house and I'd have to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on top of the fridge with a can of Raid in one hand and a very large shoe in the other.

Here's a closer look, with a pen that I taped to the window for scale (after about seventeen false starts when I kept jumping back in fear every time it twitched):

Oddly, I was never afraid of spiders until I moved to Australia. That spider you see above is called a Huntsman; they're not actually deadly, just very, very massive (that's probably a baby - adult males often have a legspan of 10") and very, very hairy. They also make a horrible crunching squishing noise when you kill them. My spine is crawling just thinking about it.

Anyway, Huntsman Spiders like to live in large trees. When I lived in Alice Springs, I had to park my car underneath one of those large trees. Once a week or so, a gigantic, hairy spider would drop onto my windshield, and my screams would hit a pitch only audible to dogs. Of course then the little bastards would run onto the roof of the car, and I'd spend the next fifteen minutes in a panicky state, trying frantically to decide whether I should stay where I was until I could identify their location, or make a wild dash for the safety of the house. Thankfully, there seem to be fewer of these spiders in this area of the country than there were in the Alice (the one in my window notwithstanding), and I also no longer have to park under a tree. Reason #53,492 why moving was a good idea.

Have I mentioned that I've also found these bad boys on my bath towel when I stepped out of the shower, and nested in of my socks (there is no worse feeling in the world than sticking your foot in a sock and feeling something hairy tickle your toe)? Both events are guaranteed to wake you up in the morning. So you can see why I've started to be a bit freaked out by spiders. It doesn't help that this country is also home to Sydney Funnel-Webs and Redbacks, both dangerously venomous. Then again, I doubt any of this comes as a surprise to anyone.

Australia is infamous for its lethal wildlife - hell, even the plants are poisonous. Eight of the ten deadliest snakes in the world live in Australia, and all of the the top five are from here. And forget about going in the ocean, unless you want to sample pain from a Box Jellyfish, Blue Ring Octopus or Scorpionfish, not to mention the legendarily aggressive saltwater crocodiles. These crocs are one of the few animals that I am genuinely terrified of - if you see a live one (hopefully at the zoo and not in the wild), look it in the eye and you'll understand. They're not evil, merely instinctive, but there is no mammalian warmth, no hope for affection or mercy - they are cold, calculating, prehistoric killing machines, and that is all.

This photo was taken on a jumping crocodile cruise we went on a few years ago in Darwin. We were in a smallish, single level tour boat like this. I have never been closer to actually peeing my pants.

Why do people still persist in living here when seemingly everything is trying to kill them? Australians have a perverse pride for the multitude of dangers they can unleash on unsuspecting tourists. Further proof of their toughness, I guess - although frankly, I think any country that invented the meat pie floater is just a wee bit unhinged, and possibly gleefully suicidal.

I love these people.

*I have to thank Terry Pratchett, who wrote this in The Last Continent. I've never seen Australia summed up quite so aptly.