The Snake and the Camel Toe!

Well after 7 months of working in the Australian outback and not seeing a snake I was beginning to think they were just another myth like the Lochness monster.  I had come across many snakes while at work, but they were of the rubber kind that had been strategically placed under my boots or tied to shovels that I was going to pick up, purely to scare the shit out of me (and yes it worked). 

 

So it was on a lovely blue skied early Pilbara (the region where I work) morning as the sun had just risen. I was out walking geophysics grid lines which involves walking kilometre upon kilometre marking out every 100m.  Thinking it wasn’t going to get much better than this I walk around a hill and there spread out in-front of me on the ground is the biggest camel toe I had ever seen! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I keep walking and then come across the 2 camels whose camel toes I had just been admiring. I felt a bond with them, here we all were just wandering around in the middle of nowhere, they had there hump on there backs and I had my camelback on. We were brothers from quite different mothers.

Feeling quite humble and lucky to be out and about and experiencing all this I’m walking along singing to myself looking down at the GPS.  Out of the corner of my eye 2 steps in front of me lying still on the brown rocky ground with one beady eye intently looking at me is a snake! (The Ozzies probably call this one a worm, it was just over a metre long)

Anyone that knows about my nerves and dislike of creepy crawly reptile species can predict what happened next. I let out a noise reminiscent of my early childhood days, and jumped, one of those jumps where you try and get as much of your body away from the feared object, so all my arms and legs had taken off and left my abdomen behind. I took off to a safer distant, quite happy to see that the snake slowly slithered stealthily off under the cover of some spinifex bushes.

My nerves were shot as I stood on the rock, trying to capture a photo of my reptilian friend.  The photo below is the photo I took.  I showed my workmates the photo, and they laugh and say “Hap, it looks like your standing miles away”, “bloody aye I was standing miles away, I had all 3X of the optical zoom extended, I wasn’t getting anywhere near that”.  Its one thing getting bitten by a snake, but its bloody stupid getting bitten while trying to get a photo of one, just look at Steve Irwin, now thats a good message to the young kids at home to leave dangerous animals alone. 

My nerves were so on edge that when my camera automatically shut off and beeped I threw my hands in the air and let it fly, the only thing stopping it from hitting a space station was the strap I had luckily put around my wrist.  But not that it mattered as that night I left the camera in my pocket and put my pants through the washing machine and just to make sure it was totally ruined I put it in the dryer! – good one.

With 3 km more of grid lines to walk, I carried on like a 60’s hippy tripping on mushrooms, as every stick I came accross turned into a snake. 

Then I start thinking, if I did get bitten and venom injected, the outcome wouldn’t be good. By the time I radioed in with co-ords and located by medics, transported back to the mine camp, would be close to a couple of hours, and then have to wait for the flying doctors.

Then you start thinking, the only reason I saw the snake was because it was on brown rock, but 99% of the time I’m walking through knee high spinifex. There would of been 100’s of times I had stepped close to snakes but not known.  So 7 months of snake tolerance that had built up, was gone. Let me tell ya, that 3 km of grid lines seemed never ending. Everything seemed out to get me, kangaroos jumping out, spinifex pigeons waiting till I was right on top of them before they screeched and flew out, and even my dam daggy dreadlocks hitting my face was enough to send me into cardiac arrest. I was ready for a drink by the end.

Snakes and Camel Toes, Hap