Bush turkeys, leeches and goannas

We just got back from our first camping trip in Australia. I was pretty nervous about it, likely because of a story my sister told me years ago involving a large bug that crawled into her ear while she was sleeping in a tent in Australia. The bugs here FREAK ME OUT, and I just can't seem to get used to the sheer size and quantity of them. And, based on the size of the cockroaches and spiders that we've seen in our apartment, the thought of what they must be like in the outdoors creeped me out.

It turns out I was needlessly worried. Camping in Australia is similar to camping in Canada, and it felt almost comforting to do something so familiar...sit in camping chairs by the fire, tell stories, let the kids run around like a bunch of crazies. We went with Gus' classmate's family, which was great because Gus was kept entertained the whole time by his school friend and her sister.

There were a couple of differences, no picnic tables on the sites (standard issue in Canadian campsites), an absence of marshmallows and hotdogs for roasting (both are hard to come by in Sydney, and when you do find them, they just don't taste the same), and the campground is self-serve - no rangers in sight. You book ahead of time by phone, then when you get there, you pay by putting your money in an envelope and sliding it into a sort of mailbox-type thing. They also had big gas barbeques every few sites, very handy for cooking up snags for supper.

We went to Dharug National Park, just 1.5 hours northwest of here. The park was beautiful, with a large escarpment as a backdrop. If you look really hard at the bottom of this picture, you'll see Gus with his friend and one of the grown-ups checking out the Hawkesbury river, which ran close to our campsite.

Here's Gus, as we head out on a bushwalk on the first morning we were there.


When we finished our bushwalk, we realized we all had leeches burrowing through our shoes and socks and spent about 10 minutes flicking them off our ankles, feet and shoes. ewwwwww. As luck would have it, I was one of only two of our group of eight that got bitten (is that what it's called?) by a leech. I'm just thankful it wasn't Gus, cause that would have spelled the end of bushwalks for the next few years.



LEECH!!! Ewwww!


We had really hoped to see some wallabies or wombats out in the wild. Vic below, looking for possums in the trees.


Instead, we saw a whole bunch of bush turkeys walking around the campsites and this goanna by the outhouses. This thing was about 3-4 feet long. No kidding! We stayed a good distance away, because our travelling companions informed us that they sometimes mistake people for trees and have been known to try to claw their way up people. They said that you should quickly lie down if you see one running towards you. I'm not sure if they were messing with us, but I'm hoping I'll never have the opportunity to test it out.