Plagues and Floods

The first month (and a bit) of our trip has been biblical. Not only is there a global pandemic, but we’ve experienced a locust plague, a mouse plague, frogs, and then floods…

Locusts

When we arrived in Dubbo, we noticed that there were these cricket / grasshopper like things all over the place. As the days went by, there were more and more and more of them. I googled it and found out that it was an Australian Plague Locust. In the morning when we went to the toilet block (before they cleaned it) under each of 6 sinks, it looked like this:

And one of the days we were walking around town, they were all over the walls of the buildings. We also went to a park in the middle of town and for each step you took, hundreds (or thousands?) of locusts went flying up in the air, smacking you in the legs, body, head, etc. I took a video of it, but unfortunately can’t seem to upload it here…

Mice

And then there are the mice… I think the best way to describe this is some images from the newspapers (The Guardian and 7 News):

Ok, we haven’t seen anything quite that bad… BUT, we did stop at a rest stop near Coonamble where we saw hundreds of them scurrying around (and eating each other). AND, we’ve caught a few in our car and in our caravan (I think 6 or 7 all up?) YUCK! You could hear them running around at night squeaking and nibbling. And the ones in the car kept setting off the alarm in the middle of the night.

But in general, our experience with them was more like this (and these don’t include the ones we caught in traps in the car and caravan…)

Frogs

While in Lightning Ridge, it rained most of the time. On the second day, we hopped into the swimming pool at the caravan park and there were these things swimming in it (lots of them!). The kids identified them as tadpoles (I didn’t have my glasses on so had no idea). The next day, all these tadpoles became frogs. The chorus (read “racket’) that the frogs made at night was incredible. Our favourite was the “Wot” frog – as you walk by it keeps asking you “Wot?” (reminds me of my kids…). A few days later we drove to another artesian bath (see Lightning Ridge post) and there were dead frogs floating everywhere (gross!)

Other than that though, we quite liked the frogs and hearing them at night and seeing them hop all over the park and artesian baths.

Floods

Next came the floods… As I mentioned before, it had been raining a lot over several weeks, the ground was saturated. And then, a storm from the east collided with a storm from the west. The result was disastrous. The worst flooding NSW has seen in (sources vary) 20-100 years. There were reports (especially from the east coast) of dramatic rescues and houses drifting away. To top that, there were then also several images of millions of spiders trying to escape the floodwaters and deadly snakes jumping into rescue boats!

The first picture below shows what the floods looked like in nearby towns (not my image – it’s from the Daily Telegraph)

For our part, it meant that many of the roads around us were flooded and we opted to stay a few extra days in Lightning Ridge hoping that the flood levels would drop and we’d be able to drive out. Here’s what the road closures looked like the day after the floods:

We eventually made it out of Lightning Ridge nearly one week after the floods. But still, we had to cross a few small “rivers” over the road and some damaged road sections. A week after the floods we were still getting flood warnings and the rivers were still pretty swollen. But, it was nice to see the water roaring and the outback green with grass and emus everywhere instead of just red dirt.