Hunter's Saga: Keep Hope

Yesterday was not a very good day. To start with I woke up with a slight cold, thanks to all the sick people staying in our hostel, which grew into flu like symptoms. That in itself is going to make this week hard, since I will be dealing with congestion, body aches and a fever while sleeping in a van and traveling. That is only the beginning though.

We drove all the way from Melbourne today in our rented Wicked van which took us about four hours. As Wicked vans go it would seem we got the short end of the stick. The one we got is very old and beat up with numerous dents and doors that don’t seal worth a dam, worst of all the Wicked people thought it would be really cool to have people driving around in a van that has vulgar sentences spray painted on the sides and back. Now the first thing people see as they drive up behind us is, “I’m good in bed, but even better up against a wall”. Now while it might be true ;), it probably wont lead to good first impressions with the people we meet. The van does run well though so we will take it in stride and hope that somewhere down the road we don’t run into a biker gang with a fetish for young boys…

We made it to the Grampions climbing area about ten last night and got up on the van roof to look at the most amazing starry night sky I have ever witnessed. A sky filled with thousands of diamond specks from horizon to horizon without obstruction, it was just the view Leighton and I had been looking forward too. That was when we began to hear the buzz of millions of tiny wings and we realized that we were slowly being drained alive of our blood by mozzies (mosquitoes). We quickly hopped in the van, but they were all around us, and it was no good trying to kill them all, so we drove off up the road from where we were staying until the wind had blown the little mozzy buggers away. We than closed up all the windows and doors and crawled into our beds in the back of the van. As we slowly roasted in the hot humid interior of the van I began to realize that my feet felt somewhat numb and that there was still the loud sound of buzzing near at hand. I switched on my head lap to see what it was only to discover that the entire ceiling of the van was covered in mosquitoes like a carpet and that the reason my feet were numb was that I had already received roughly 80 bites on each foot (I don’t know why but the mosquitoes really liked my feet, especially my ankles, as apposed to other parts of my body).

This was to much, I could not hope to sleep the night with the thousand plus killer blood suckers in the van and Leighton was under the same belief, so we jumped into the front seats and quickly sped off for the nearest town where we hoped to find a more bug free environment.

No mater how hard we looked or where we drove mosquitoes continually devoured us at every turn and by 2:00am we were out of options. As we sat in the local 24hr trucker stop and watched the ground outside crawl with insects a local at the truck stop mentioned to us that due to the recent flooding in Victoria there were millions more bugs than there had ever been in the state. So many in fact that people were starting to get invaded in their homes and that a small war on insects was in affect throughout the region. This pretty much forced us to come to the conclusion that we were not going to be able to sleep in the van this night. So we sucked up our pride and scraped together what money we had on us so that we could rent an overpriced hotel room for seven hours and get a little bit of sleep. The only good that came of this first two days on the road is that we woke several dollars poorer and to beautiful blue skies that allowed us to work on some Grampions bouldering. I don’t know what we are going to do for the rest of this week though. If we can’t sleep at night than we are in quite a pickle.