My wife Allison and I like to travel together. We go places both popular and off the beaten path. Allison is the spearhead of these adventures (a continuation of her single, solo travelling life), and it's one of the reasons I love her. Sometimes we go safe places, like Disneyland, other times... well, not so much. Allison and (now) I also don't like to spend a lot of money on these trips. It's very logical. If you save a dollar on one trip, you can put it towards the next trip. After all, a bed is just a place to sleep, and the adventure happens outside of your hotel... or hostel dorm... or tent.
So when we travel we often like to travel on the cheap. It's regularly allowed us to experience some pretty cool things, and it's also almost killed me on several occasions. But, as Allison once told me while I was on the brink of death, "If we live, it'll make a great story." So far all I have is stories, and here's one of them:
Australia - Travelling through Australia is already a dangerous thing. Most of the world's most dangerous spiders and snakes live in Australia. Even in the largest city, Sydney, at any point a deadly black window spider could bite you. Snakes aren't as big a concern in large cities as they are in the north and central areas. So you could imagine my joy when Allison wanted to visit Ayers Rock (Uluru) in the middle of the outback. This is, as I learned from a visit to a zoo in Sydney, the prime habitat for the most deadly snake in the world.
Ayers Rock is a very isolated place. The only place to stay is a small resort area a few kilometres from the famous rock. The resort offers everything from five star bungalows to places to pitch your tent. Seeing as I've joined Allison's cult of money saving while travelling, a cabin in the campsite sounded fine. Of course, we booked this long before I knew about the snakes.
We arrived at the campsite and I was nervous. After all, this was the outback, and only Paul Hogan can survive out there. As we walked up to the main campsite building, after walking past several of the five star resorts, I saw a giant sign pasted to the door: "Beware of Dingos". Attached to this sign was a picture of a very ferocious looking dingo. While I was assured that there were fences around the campsite, I couldn't help but wonder why they would have this sign up if everything was "safe".
While this certainly didn't put me at ease, at least I knew that I was sleeping in a cabin, and not out in the open that night. Sure I might run into a dingo, but at least I would be awake when it happened. Not that I would have any idea on how to fight off a pack of bloodthirsty wild dogs. In principle, I was on board with Allison's plan to make our steak dinner on the isolated "barbie" way out in the open, but in practice I was on constant lookout for the dingos.
That night was when I truly felt like I was going to die. Allison had visited the southern hemisphere a few times in her life (this was my first time), but she never thought to go out at night and specifically look for the Southern Cross. Seeing as we were out of a city, in the middle of nowhere, she thought it would be fun to visit a walking trail that was in the middle of this resort "town". This trail was in a circle of wilderness around which all of the resorts were dotted . It takes about a half hour to walk from one side of the circle to the other. In the middle of this trail was a raised hill with a place to look around at the countryside, and at night a nice dark place to see the stars.
What could be more romantic than a night walk under the stars eventually sitting on a bench and searching the skies for the Southern Cross? Probably walking this trail with a guy that didn't insist on pushing you into the grass so I could walk in the middle of the trail because that was the only place I could make sure that there weren't any snakes. While there was a possibility of the dingo fence keeping large dogs out of the area, I was pretty sure that the snakes could slither in and out as they wanted. I also knew from my past visit to the zoo that these snakes could kill me. Quickly. There were lots of little bushes around the path; perfect places for any snake to jump out and finish me off.
Allison regularly reminds me that nothing happened, and we didn't come across any snakes. I'm convinced that I kept us safe. If it weren't for my regular whimpering and complaining scaring the snakes away, a copperhead or taipan may have jumped out and killed either one of us.
Later