From "
Down Under", by Bill Bryson, which I believe he wrote about Australia to discourage people from going there.
"It isn't possible in a single lifetime to read about all the dangers that lurk under every wattle bush or ripple of water in this wondrously venomous and toothy country."
---
I began to feel a tremor of foreboding - a feeling not lightened when Sonja gave a cry of delight at the sight of a spider by our feet and said: "Hey, look, a redback!" A redback, if you don't know already, is death on eight legs.
---
"Most snakes don't want to hurt you. If you're out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes."
This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I had ever been given.
---
"So you're telling me," said Alan, for whom all this was new, "that if I waded into the water now I would die?"
"In the most wretched and abject agony known to man," I replied.
"Jesus," he muttered.
"And don't pick up any of the seashells," I added, stopping him from leaning over to pick up a seashell. I explained to him about coneshells - the venomous creatures that lurk inside some of the handsomest shells, waiting for a human hand to sink their vile pincers into."
"Seashells will kill you?" he said. "They've got lethal seashells here?"
---
"My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don't leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days' provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighbourhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn't just going round in a large circle. From time to time I would come to a leafy roundabout with roads radiating off in various directions, each presenting an identical vista of antipodean suburban heaven, and I would venture down the one that looked most likely to take me to civilization, only to emerge ten minutes later at another identical roundabout. I never saw another soul on foot or anyone watering a lawn or anything like that. Very occasionally a car would glide past, pausing at each intersection, the driver looking around with a despairing expression that said: 'Now where the fuck is my house?'
---
Between the merciless sun and the isolation, outback people are not always the most gifted of communicators. We had heard of one shopkeeper who, upon being asked by a smiling visitor from Sydney where the fish were biting, stared at the man incredulously for a long moment and replied: 'In the fucking river, mate, where do you think?'
[I know this is much, but I worship the man.
]
