Heat, Flies, and other Plagues

We've noticed that when we're in Antarctica, it's hard for us to remember what heat feels like.  Multiple times now, we've planned a vacation somewhere hot and tell ourselves that it will feel great.  In our Antarctican minds 100 degrees F/38 degrees C seems pleasant.  After Thailand, Tonga and now Australia, perhaps we finally learned our lesson.  That temperature is just plain hot....and with an added humidity level that was formerly unheard of in those parts, we spent far too much time in our air conditioned Camperoo.

If the humidity was a novelty, the flies were not.  In all of my research on the internet, I didn't read anything about the flies, but when we spoke to the locals, they claimed that they were a common irritant, especially when the wind blew a certain direction.  Irritating, yes, but also kind of fascinating (for about a second) how they could cling onto clothing in even the heaviest wind.  Case in point:



Or this:

We're wearing head nets in the picture above, taken at Kalbarri National Park.  If you take a good look at the trees and the river, you can see how much the river is in flood.

Floods....the entire region, like parts of eastern Australia, had also suffered from extreme rainfall and flooding throughout the 3 months prior to our arrival.  The floods wiped out many of the fertile plantations in the area we were traveling in and everywhere we went, we saw signs of the damage - washed out roadways, gas stations that had been inundated with water that were closed indefinitely, banana tree trunks covered in mud, their fronds black with rot and... the locusts.

Locusts were everywhere in every stage of growth.  They were squashed on the blacktop, active in the brush and grass alongside the highway and ever-present in our grille and on our windshield.  This is a shot of a bucket of water for washing windows at one of the roadside gas stations.  Yep....locusts.

We found a nice, shady caravan park in Carnarvon one evening and discovered (while on the toilet, mind you) that it was overrun with frogs.

All of this got us thinking about plagues and we wondered if we hadn't been transported into some sort of modern day version of a Biblical story.  We were waiting for murrain, boils, and the death of someone's first born son.