Saturday, December 19, 2009

Bugs of Agnes Water

On Friday, we said goodbye to Sophie and Dan and thanked them for looking after us so well. After cleaning the fruit bat droppings off our car (possibly the most revolting task of the holiday so far), we set off for our interim destination, Agnes Water. This is near the town of Seventeen Seventy, so named because it was the site of Cook's second landing during his historic voyage in 1770.

The only eventful part of the journey came when the police diverted all of the traffic off the road in order to avoid a car accident. We were sent onto an unsealed road running parallel to the main highway. Naturally, this was very exciting:

We arrived at our hostel in the early evening. After checking in, we headed over to Seventeen Seventy and walked along the harbour.

We ate in a Thai Restaurant called Yok Attack in Agnes Water (possibly my favourite meal of the holiday so far), before returning to the hostel and settling down for the night. We noticed a few insects in the room but thought nothing of it.

I was awoken at 6:45 the next morning by Hannah, who had noticed that the insects we had seen the night before were now crawling all over us. This was rather distressing, to say the least, and we spent the next few minutes freaking out and trying get rid of them. Here is a entomological picture of one of them:
 
We think that they are baby cockroaches. If anyone knows better than us then please let me know.

Worse was to come; Hannah had left her bag open on the floor and it was also crawling with the little "blighters" so we proceeded to spend an hour or so hunting them down. In the process, we discovered that her bag had several pockets of which we were previously unaware, some of which the insects had already found.

Hannah has also written about bugs of Agnes Water in her blog here.

On the way out of town, we stopped at the supermarket and bought some insect spray. I have a feeling that we will be using it a lot as we head north (as it happens, we didn't end up using the insect spray much; I think that we were just unlucky on that one night).

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I'm sorry about all the bugs you found in your room.
Did you find out what type of bug is the one in the picture? I have them in my house and one person says is a type of termite and another that it's a baby cockroach. I need to know to see what type of action should I take. Thanks...

Chris said...

I'm afraid that we never found out what type of bug it was. We suspect a baby cockroach but we don't know what to do about them.