Leeches!

G'day mates!

Hi! I'm still in Kangaroo Valley but at a very different place.  I'm staying at a place that has 2 horses, an alpaca, a donkey, a duck, six chooks, an a dog.  Those are the pets.  There is also the wildlife!

Besides the ever present spiders, cicadas and mossies (mosquitoes) there are various lizards and snakes.  I haven't seen the python, thankfully; he leaves in the roof and eats whatever is up there.  (I don't even want to think what's up there. Hopefully nothing since he's there.)  I can see his shedded skin on the Australian tree fern next to the kitchen door though.  He's around 6' long and 3-4" in diameter.   Apparently there are at least 2 different kinds of snakes here.  One is a red bellied black snake that is venomous; the other is harmless.  My hosts assure me that the snakes are more afraid of me than I am of them.  I don't think so.

crimson rosellas and doves

There are gorgeous birds here.  The crimsom rosellas are blue and red parrot like birds.  There are white headed doves and I've seen at least 2 kookaburras.  There are tiny little blue (male) and brown (female) birds.  Did I mention that it's almost always noisy here? The birds make noise at different times.  There is one set that starts as soon as there is any light (before 5 am) including the kookaburras and birds that sound like a light rail train going by real fast.  And the cicadas are LOUD!  They chirp all day.  You can hear their wings flapping when they fly by.  They are almost as big as hummingbirds.  At night, a different set of birds make noise.  And they are joined by a chorus of frogs and who knows what else.  Who said it was quiet in the countryside?

golden orb spider on chook fence

A couple of other critters.  Luckily my hosts warned me that sometimes wombats like to scratch their backs on the caravan I'm staying in.  On Sunday night, my first night, we had a storm.  During the heaviest downpour, I felt the caravan shake.  I thought it might be the wind.  But it didn't feel like the wind.  Then I remembered about the wombats.  I'm pretty sure it was the wombat hiding under there scratching his back.  Wombats are nocturnal.  My host drove me out onto the road so I could see them.  They are cute little furry pig/hamstery animals.  The ones we saw were 15"- 20" long and less than a foot high.


There are leeches here!  In the grass, in the plants, everywhere.  My hosts have taken 6 off over the last 2 days.  I had to pull 2 of them off my jeans today.  They were trying to go through my jeans!  I was lucky to notice them before they got all the way through.  They inject an anesthetic and a blood thinner so that you don't feel them and when they are full, they fall off and you continue bleeding.  Ewwww!!!!!  I'm thinking positive.  I will not have a leech on me.  I will not have a leech on me.






I'm enjoying my stay here.  My hosts are very nice, well educated, well travelled, converse with me, and work with me in the yard.  This is what wwoofing is supposed to be.

G'day!!
Cyn