Monday, December 22, 2008

ET, phone home? (And the snake plot thickens...)




Wycliffe Wells, ever heard of it? Neither had I until I read the 4W drive book our lovely Irishman gave us. It’s a basically a caravan park somewhere between Alice Springs and Darwin that has been labelled the UFO capital of Australia due to a multitude of, ah, you guessed it, UFO sightings. It is quite the place. Believer or not, anyone could have ball here, I reckon. Anyone with a bit of imagination anyways. For me, this was like entering a haven. It is by far the sweetest looking caravan park I have ever been to. Statues everywhere, paintings, you name it, they’ve probably got it. If it’s weird enough. It screamed photoshoot! And I do love a good work session amongst the crazy and bizarre.

We’re all pretty hungry, hot and sticky by the time we get there. Once in the cafe there are clippings covering most, if not all, walls. One room even has an international doll collection, and a big old bed with a gorilla on it. Did I say it was a weird place?


On some shelves I see several; snakes in jars. Curious as I am, I have to have a closer look. What snakes are they? Do they look anything like the one we found?

As I’m tinkering with them, a man walks over to me.

“You playin’ with my snakes?” Meet Russell “Big Dick” Perry, manager and snake man.

He tells me about his snakes and says he just got bit the other day. A Taipan, I believe it was, but don’t quote me on it. He had driven over it with his Ute (that has no door for quicker access) and the snake had flung itself up and nicked him in the shoulder. He said it had only been a scratch from one fang; otherwise he would be in shit creek. As we get talking I tell him about our snake/ legless lizard encounter and what the lady at the Reptile Centre told us to do when meeting a snake. I thought he was about to fall over as the words came out of my mouth.

“Stand still?!! What!?! And let the bastard kill ya!?!!!?”

According to Russell snakes are far from blind (which kinda makes sense to me) and they are curious. They will get you if you stand there. Not only that, but some of them are really aggressive and will attack you, and hey, guess what!?! You can’t outrun a brown snake!! They are faster than greased fucken lightning.

So, later we show Russell the video of the snake and us. Shit. “That is not a legless lizard. That is a venomous snake.” He is outraged that the woman at the Reptile Centre said it was a legless lizard. He goes to find out what snake it is and quickly returns. “That’s an Ingram’s Brown Snake, and that can kill ya.” He looks at me and calls me a luck lady. “You could’ve been in a coffin. Did you see how fast that thing moves?”

The Ingram’s Brown Snake isn’t even in our Field guide of Aussie Reptiles. He gives us the lo-down on neurotoxins and says you would’ve had about 3 hours.

Hopefully there will be a video up of Russell on www.theinlandsea.com.au soon.

He was quite the character. Funny as hell and sweet as. He found my physical size, or lack thereof, very amusing.

Anyway, it goes with the story that we did sit out that night looking for UFO’s. Russell is personally not a believer, but cannot deny what he has seen with his own eyes. Last one only a couple of days before we got there. As expected, we didn’t see any. You never do when you’re looking for it, I reckon. And I’ll insert here that though I am no fanatic, I do believe in life outside and beyond the earth and dumbass humans. I find it somewhat ignorant and self-righteous to think that we are all alone and almighty. We are not alone, we are not Gods.

We went a bit back and forth, shooting then looking for UFO’s. All of a sudden we’re surrounded by invisible howling Dingoes. It was intense. And I’ll admit to being a bit scared due to the fair number of them you could hear. But wow, what a sound! After we went to bed around 3.30 in the morning they start up again, some of them fairly close. (They do come in to camp.) All in all though, I was more afraid of the 30 odd Aboriginals living under the bridge across the road than the Dingoes. But that's a whole other story...

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