Trav­el­ling in the hot­ter parts of the world brings you face to face with all sorts of creatures that you’re not used to. For an Eng­lish­man, nor­mally to be found in the com­pany of noth­ing more excit­ing than a fox or a cow, sud­denly com­ing in con­tact with everything from camels to alpacas can be daunt­ing. Faced with close encoun­ters with Aus­tralian sharks & Kangaroos, the wild dogs of India, the snakes of Laos and the ele­phants of Thai­l­and one’s view of the world is chal­lenged and you are taken right out of your com­fort zone. But, noth­ing pre­pares you for hav­ing to face a creature that you are nor­mally adverse to. I left Eng­land with one par­tic­u­lar animal dis­like; that of spiders.

I’m not sure what they have done to deserve it, but it seems almost instinct­ive. I just cant stand them. They give me the impres­sion of being unhappy, of being mean, of being viol­ent. Spiders in the UK may not be able to enven­o­mate a human, but that doesn’t stop them from try­ing. I have been bit­ten by an Eng­lish spider, and it was a little shock­ing to actu­ally feel it. I hoped I wouldn’t be bit­ten by any on my travels. I trace my fear back to my early teens where a nest of the little blight­ers was on the wall in my room and I awoke to find myself crawl­ing with them. But, if I am hon­est with myself, it goes back fur­ther than that. I vividly recall, at the age of 6, burst­ing into tears when my mother gave me a wind-up spider as a Christ­mas present. It is amaz­ing that a child­hood memory can trig­ger a cer­tain response; that of wrath. You see, I am not so much afraid of spiders, than that I have to kill them when they are present. In Eng­land this usu­ally amounts to a fen­cing lunge while wear­ing shoes, or the ser­vices of a cat, but Eng­lish spiders are gen­er­ally small; what is to be done when the spider is bigger?

The cor­rect way to con­quer a fear is to face it down. This worked with my child­hood fear of the dark, which I cured by lock­ing myself in the air­ing cup­board. It also worked with my fear of heights by my jump­ing off the highest bun­gee in New Zea­l­and. Sit­ting here now, can I say the fol­low­ing tales have cured me of a fear of spiders? I will leave that to the end of the art­icle, after my memory has dis­gorged these tales.

Warn­ing. If you are scared of spiders, then these stor­ies may make you want to never leave your house. Of course, and espe­cially if you live in the coun­try, your house is teem­ing with them already.

Just so you know.

All of the fol­low­ing are abso­lutely true. I know because they happened to me. Hon­estly, I don’t know why so many of the bas­tards came after me, it must be in revenge for the thou­sands I have killed in the UK. I think they put the word out that Basho was com­ing, with orders to crawl all over him…

…and so they did.

The one where Basho meets the Wolf and White Tailed spiders of Australia.

Cesca and I lay in the hostel. It was hot as hell. That sort of muggy heat not usual to an Eng­lish­man, who is more used to cold North Sea cli­mates. It was the heat of Cairns, on the north east coast of Aus­tralia, a muggy tir­ing wet heat. We were exhausted. Not least of all because this was the morn­ing after our three day diving course and we had been work­ing hard, but also because we had been out all night cel­eb­rat­ing our hav­ing passed the train­ing. No one can drink as hard as a crowd of divers. Even Rugby play­ers would have watched us from across the bar and remarked, “Oh, surely that’s just too much!”

Cesca stirred on her side of the bed and groaned. Obvi­ously the head ache was com­ing for her. “I think we need to take a few days off.”

I opened an eye, “Sure.” I paused. “Just one point, we don’t have jobs to take a day off from.”

“We have been bus­sing up this coun­try for the last two weeks! I need to take a rest before we go on.”

“You have some­thing in mind?”

Without bring­ing her head out of the bed cov­ers, she reached a hung-over arm to her bed­side table and without look­ing picked up a pamph­let and slapped it on my chest.

I con­sidered the pic­tures and title. The text was nigh on unread­able in my cur­rent men­tal state. “The Sanc­tu­ary?” I asked.

“Three days of peace in the jungle.”

“Ok. But, first breakfast.”

So a the next day we arrived at the Sanc­tu­ary. Built as a yoga retreat lit­er­ally in the jungle south of Cairns, the main long­house dom­in­ated the lush trees all around. The bro­chure spoke of wild cas­sowar­ies’ roam­ing the tracks, it also said that if you didn’t like spiders then per­haps this was not your place. The owner drove us up to the long­house and I saw that it was of the highest build qual­ity. A sort of open plan res­taur­ant, bar and sit­ting room. It was wide and tall and peace­ful. I loved it immediately.

The owner checked us in, and I whispered to Cesca, “Where are the rooms?”

She simply smiled and said, “You’ll see.”

The owner handed us over to a Woofer to show us our room. Woof­ers are people swap­ping work in exchange for free accom­mod­a­tion. It is a way of get­ting around the need for a work­ing Visa when vis­it­ing a coun­try. A month from this day we too went Woof­ing, which you can read about here. Any­way, he was Eng­lish, and a nice guy. He led us out of the Long­house and down the path on the hill, into the jungle that envel­oped us imme­di­ately. The path cut a neat swath through the trees and light filtered through the leaves to become dappled as it played over our faces. The guy was speak­ing, and I wasn’t really listen­ing until sud­denly my ears pricked up.

“Yeah, we had one in room one the other night.” he was say­ing, “that’s your room.”

“Oh, really?” said Cesca.

“Yeah, they called me down to get it out,” he motioned a thumb at me, “but, you have him. Don’t worry.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Hunts­men,” said Cesca.

Hunts­men spiders. “I see” I said in that care­ful Eng­lish way of voicing extreme discomfort.

The Woofer, being Eng­lish, picked up on it straight away, “Hey don’t worry about it, you will be fine.”

Then I saw the room and I use the term lightly. Ima­gine this: You take a frame of a room, just the edges, like a wire­frame model, and instead of walls made of wood or bricks you use green net­ting. So the room was basic­ally a square tent in the jungle, and right amongst it.

“The sun rise is the best bit, “the Woofer explained, “It comes up the path and through the trees. It is won­der­ful way to wake up.”

Cesca exclaimed in excite­ment and clutched my arm.

“Wow,” she said.

I must admit, it was spe­cial. The room had a large bed in the middle and no power. Not even a light, but it had that rus­tic charm exper­i­enced only by those liv­ing on desert islands and per­haps by Tar­zan. Of course, the net­ting was not what you might call air­tight; it wrapped around the frame leav­ing huge gaps open to the out­side. Any­thing that crawled could get in.

We plonked down our stuff and ven­tured back to the long­house for lunch. There we met with some very nice people and made some good friends. Friends that I am glad to say, have stayed so. We talked with them and the woof­ers until the night fell and had an excel­lent bottle of wine. Then the time came to head to bed. The path was darker than a black-hole and without a torch the steep path could be dan­ger­ous. Slowly we made our way down to our room and took it in.

“Go on then,” Cesca said nudging me with her arm.

“Go on then what?”

“Go check the room.”

I sighed and reach­ing into my go-bag took hold of the nearest blunt object, which turned out to be a plastic lunch­box lid. I hef­ted it a few times and motioned to Cesca to fol­low me. We climbed up to the door and played our torch over the green fab­ric. It very neatly blocked the light from enter­ing the room and I real­ised we would have to check it from the inside.

I found the bolt and clicked it open. I had that sense one gets when sneak­ing around the house for fear of wak­ing someone.

“Get on with it,” Cesca said.

I pulled a face, turned on my head torch and flung open the door. Imme­di­ately some­thing moved in the room. I heard a scrab­bling of some­thing frightened and annoyed at being dis­turbed. My torch played around the net-walls of the room as I tried to loc­ate the source of the noise when sud­denly a cricket ball sized shape flickered into view and flashed towards me. Cesca stepped back and I invol­un­tar­ily cried out as the white shape, only just caught in the torch light, flashed dir­ectly at my face. Instinct kicked in and I bat­ted it away with the plastic lid in my hand. The con­tact was a heavy thunk and whatever it was fell back into the room, only to flow care­fully in an arc and flash for my face again. I bat­ted it away, ter­ror giv­ing my body extra might but, again, it simply came straight for me. Over the next ten seconds I played ten­nis with it, cry­ing out like a pro­fes­sional, bat­ting it back­hand and fore­hand in des­per­a­tion to get it to stop com­ing for me. What was it? My mind screamed. Sud­denly I real­ised that I was stand­ing in the way of the exit. It was prob­ably try­ing to get away! I jumped to one side and my head torch, loosened by the action, was flung from my head and fell against the doorframe to end up at my feet. Almost imme­di­ately the creature made a dash for it and…

…landed on it.

There was a moment of silence, broken only by my heart pound­ing. Both Cesca and I leaned in and took a close look. It was a, slightly battered, Goliath Moth. It had been attrac­ted to the bright light of my head torch and acted only as come nat­ur­ally for a moth. We looked at each other and laughed. I put the poor fel­low out­side the door. Goliath Moths are huge in the extreme and he was not per­man­ently dam­aged by our 2 sets to 1 encounter.

We checked every inch of the room that night, but noth­ing was there and after a cuddle, we tried to sleep. In the morn­ing I awoke to find Cesca wide awake, with her cam­era in her hand, point­ing at some­thing. Sit­ting on the bed post, star­ing at us, was a large spider. It was mov­ing its feet in time like it was tap­ping them in impa­tience. Cesca was tak­ing pho­tos of it. I looked and thought I recog­nised it as a White Tail spider.

White-tailed spiders are medium-sized spiders nat­ive to south­ern and east­ern Aus­tralia, and so named because of the whit­ish tips at the end of their abdo­mens. Com­mon spe­cies are Lam­pona cyl­indrata and Lam­pona mur­ina. Both these spe­cies have been intro­duced to New Zea­l­and.^[1]

White-tailed spiders are vag­rant hunters who seek out prey rather than spin­ning a web to cap­ture it. Their pre­ferred prey is other spiders and they are equipped with venom for hunt­ing. WIKIPEDIA

The White Tail has a fear­some repu­ta­tion out­side Aus­tralia, mainly due to exag­ger­ated stor­ies in the papers regard­ing the effect of its bite. It is said that the venom causes nec­rotic lesions in the vic­tims flesh and huge chunks of your body rot and never heal. Pho­tos abound the net of the dam­age these white spiders cause.

So say.

Suf­fice to say that while a bite from one is not some­thing you want; it would bloody hurt, the flesh eat­ing venom has not been proven by sci­ence. It may be that there is a par­tic­u­lar vari­ety of White Tail that causes this dam­age, or it may be some­thing else alto­gether, Nev­er­the­less, I wanted noth­ing to do with it. The idea that it may have been crawl­ing all over us was bad enough. We gave it a wide birth and dressed for break­fast. It rotated to fol­low our move­ments around the room and then climbed onto the wall where Cesca snapped this photo:

Wan­der­ing up to the Long­house was some­what of relief by this point. I wanted noth­ing more to do with spiders, giant moths and jungle for one day. We met up with our new friends and sat down for breakfast.

Here it comes…

As we tucked into the repast and regaled the above two stor­ies to our friends over cof­fee and eggs, the male of the pair sud­denly poin­ted at my right shoulder.

“You have a bloody big spider on you mate.” He said alarmed.

I remem­ber think­ing that he must have been jok­ing, just adding some spice to the story we were telling, and I laughed. It was only when Cesca, sit­ting next to me, put her fork down very slowly that I real­ised that he wasn’t jok­ing. For some reason I didn’t panic at all. In fact at this point in the pro­ceed­ings I was cool as a cucum­ber. I was so cool you could keep a side of beef in me for a month. My con­scious brain took hold of me and con­trolled my reactions.

I looked.

On my right shoulder, look­ing straight at me, front legs raised threat­en­ingly, was a Wolf Spider the size of my fist. And I have big hands.

“Indeed” I said.

Wolf spiders are mem­bers of the fam­ily Lyc­osidae, from the Greek word “?????” mean­ing “wolf”. They are robust and agile hunters with good eye­sight. They live mostly sol­it­ary lives and hunt alone. Some are oppor­tun­istic wan­derer hunters, poun­cing upon prey as they find it or chas­ing it over short dis­tances. Oth­ers lie in wait for passing prey, often from or near the mouth of a bur­row. WIKIPEDIA

I could see his eyes reflect­ing mine as the Wolf Spider has very large eyes. I could see his fangs. He was so close that my left eye couldn’t pick him up prop­erly and so I one-eye goggled at him.

With a smooth and def­in­ite motion I reached up with my right hand and swept him down and away from my body. Unfor­tu­nately the angle I chose was not a good one and the spider battered into the table edge, flicked over in mid air and landed feet-first on my testicles. I remem­ber clearly feel­ing his eight feet dig in as he landed. He was cup­ping my love spuds with the man­ner of one who has been ill used, but then fate has handed him the ulti­mate chance of pay­back and he was weigh­ing his options. This time I jol­ted in ter­ror as my sub­con­scious, clearly upset with the pigs-ear my con­scious brain had made of the situ­ation thus far, stepped in with an adrenal dump into my muscles.

For me time slowed as the chem­ical cock­tail entered my blood stream. All sorts of fight­ing sys­tems powered on. I felt no pain or fear any­more. I felt no dis­com­fort as all pain sig­nals were dampened. My reac­tions and hand to eye coördin­a­tion improved two fold and my vis­ion nar­rowed with my pupils con­tract­ing to focus on the com­ing con­flict. It was as if my con­scious brain had been relieved of duty and locked in his room. The sub­con­scious had pressed the “whoop ass button”.

With a speed that would have out-foxed Bruce Lee, my right hand moved so fast it tore real­ity apart at the seams. For under a pico­second there exis­ted a per­fect quantum moment as time divided the future into two streams. In one stream the spider still had my balls in its grip and yet in a spate of time that made a micro­second seem like an eon the other real­ity stream exer­ted itself and the spider was bat­ted off my fam­ily jew­els. My great haste caused small loc­al­ised black holes to burst into exist­ence and suck away the win­some real­ity where the eight legged freak still had hold of my love spuds!

Time’s flow returned to nor­mal and I breathed a sigh of relief as the large spider picked him­self up of the floor and ran out of the room.

“Wow,” noted Cesca, “You ok?”

“Yes. Now, where was I?”

The one where Basho meets the Aus­tralian Redback

“What do you think?” Cesca asked.

I looked at the man in ques­tion and con­sidered the options. “Hell, why not, he looks OK” Actu­ally, he looked a little crazy.

We had met Franco only about an hour before. He was a pas­sen­ger on our train from Alice Springs, deep in the out­back, to Adelaide on the south­ern coast. We were going over­land onboard the fam­ous Ghan train, one of only four trains in the entire coun­try. By far he was the most vocal man I have ever met, talk­ing ten to the dozen to any­one who would listen. Cesca had been drawn into one of the con­ver­sa­tions and they had hit it off. I joined in and we both talked to him, pump­ing him gently for any inform­a­tion about Adelaide that may help us dur­ing our com­ing stay there. Franco was a gold­mine of inform­a­tion on the sub­ject. He was Italian Aus­tralian and had lived in Adelaide for most of his life. The dif­fi­culty was pick­ing the inform­a­tion out of the high flow stream-of-conscious con­stant talk­ing he was doing.

“Talks a lot, doesn’t he?”

“He’s just had a near death experience”

Franco had explained, to any­one who would listen, that he had just sur­vived three days in the desert after his car got bogged in sand on the way back from an Abori­ginal com­mune. He had been in the com­mune to see some abori­ginal artist friends who had asked for help deal­ing with the gov­ern­ments new mis­chief. The gov­ern­ment had closed all the stores in the com­mune and opened a gov­ern­ment store, which only took tick­ets in exchange for food and sup­plies. An action known as the Inter­ven­tion, but to Franco was clearly apartheid. The dis­hon­our of this had been get­ting the Abori­gines down and they had asked for help. Franco had driven across the desert to see what was hap­pen­ing and had got stuck on the way back. For three days. Finally, he had been res­cued by some Abori­gines and pulled out of the sand.

I looked out of the win­dow at the sear­ing Aus­tralian out­back passing by. It was exceed­ingly inhos­pit­able and I wondered if his story was true.

“How did you sur­vive?” I had asked.

“Oh, I went into star­va­tion meditation.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes, I was a monk in Italy and learned the tech­nique, it was the only thing that saved me.”

“A monk…”

“Yes, I walked across Europe dressed as Charlie Chap­lin, for peace, I got to Rome and deman­ded to meet the Pope and after he saw me I became a monk.”

“The Pope…”

“Yes, but I am not a monk any­more, I teach at the University.”

“I see…”

“I know, why don’t you guys come and stay with me? I can show you around Adelaide…In exchange for a little garden­ing. Mow my lawn for example.”

He con­tin­ued for about twenty minutes, almost gasp­ing his breaths.

Cesca asked me again, “What do you think?”

“You believe him?” I was not sure that I did.

“Yes, why not?”

I looked at Cesca, she was a much bet­ter judge of this sort of thing than I. I tend to put everything through the fil­ter of firstly, my mar­tial arts train­ing, then my scep­tical fil­ter born in the cru­cible of my Philo­sophy degree. Cesca had stud­ied neither of these and so ten­ded to trust her instincts, which are excel­lent. A les­son in nat­ural Dao­ism that is not lost on me and one of the things I adore about my wife. The next morn­ing, the train arrived in Adelaide and we depar­ted. Franco rushed to get his car and we saw it com­ing off the train.

It was covered head to toe in red dust.

So, soon, we stood in his front room and he was still talk­ing. It had become to us like a back­ground track, its con­stancy driv­ing the sound under our con­scious radar. I didn’t mind, near death exper­i­ences remind us that life is pre­cious, and I am sure I would feel the same — and be talk­ing to every­one — if I had been in his situation.

If you can talk, then you are still alive.

“I have to go out, a Abori­gine in prison has freaked out, and I am his carer.”

“Sure, Franco, no prob­lems.” By now, his con­stant and out­land­ish life was not rais­ing my eye­brows. I was not sure I believed half of it, but we was a nice guy to have us to stay.

He went. Leav­ing two people he has just met alone in his house.

“You know Cesca,” I said to her, “every­one always trusts you. It’s your charm­ing face. We should become crim­in­als, we would make millions.”

She laughed, “Have you seen the back garden?”

“No, not yet.”

“Go take a look. Oh and by the way…” She poin­ted towards the side­board. I looked and saw a single framed pho­to­graph. I leaned in to see it clearly.

It was a pho­to­graph of Franco dressed as Charlie Chap­lin, on the steps of the Vat­ican, talk­ing to the Pope.

I walked out to the rear garden and took a look at it. The grass was four feet long. I would need a chain­saw to cut it down to size. Franco made good on his prom­ise that day and took us around Adelaide to see the sights. We all had a great time and got on very well. The next day, armed with an indus­trial hedge trim­mer I set to work on the lawn. It was slow going, but even­tu­ally I had removed enough to revel a path run­ning through the garden as well as the remains of a fallen down bar­be­cue. The four of us, Cesca, Franco, his friend (a local tree expert) and myself, star­ted pulling the bricks from the thicket and throw­ing them in a wheel barrow.

Franco was still talk­ing con­stantly. He really hadn’t drawn breath in the last two days, and always about him­self. I don’t think he even asked us what our jobs had been until we promp­ted him. I was not really listen­ing to what he was say­ing as I reached for the bricks, but some­thing he men­tioned made me turn and look, a brick still in my hand.

Then I looked back and the Red­back spider looked right at me.

The Red­back spider (Latrodectus has­selti) is a poten­tially dan­ger­ous spider nat­ive to Aus­tralia. It resembles a Black widow spider. It is a mem­ber of the genus Latrodectus or the widow fam­ily of spiders, which are found through­out the world. The female is eas­ily recog­nis­able by its black body with prom­in­ent red stripe on its abdo­men. Females have a body length of about a cen­ti­metre while the male is smal­ler, being only 3 to 4 mil­li­metres long. The Red­back spider is one of few anim­als which dis­play sexual can­ni­bal­ism while mating.

Red­backs are con­sidered one of the most dan­ger­ous spiders in Aus­tralia.^[1] The Red­back spider has a neur­o­toxic venom which is toxic to humans with bites caus­ing severe pain. There is an anti­venom for Red­back bites which is com­mer­cially avail­able. WIKIPEDIA

Red­back spiders are com­mon in the gar­dens of Aus­tralia, but that is not a com­fort­ing thought. It had been many years since someone died from a bite from one, but this was mainly due to the avail­ab­il­ity to the anti-venom, rather than any decreas­ing spe­cies leth­al­ity. The res­ults of the bite are almost imme­di­ate. Firstly, it hurts like a kick in the teeth. Appar­ently, you know you have been nipped by one; there is no doubt. The second res­ult is the shakes, fol­lowed by all your mucus mem­branes going into over­drive. After this your entire body starts to hurt. This get increas­ingly worse for three days until, in agony, you either get bet­ter or have a heart attack. Of course, the anti-venom makes the worst of it fade quickly.

I tried to cal­cu­late the dis­tance to the hos­pital in my head, but the spider had me mes­mer­ised. The Red­back is well named, it is coal black apart from a very red stripe down its back. It is also quite small. A rel­at­ive of the black widow, the Red­back is a mod­ern web spin­ning spider like your aver­age house spider. It as thin stick like legs and raises its body high above them. When threatened, it lacks the dis­plays of the other, more ancient, type of spider and instead raises only a few legs to reveal the fangs.

This is what it was doing now. Prob­ably annoyed at being dragged into the light by a job­bing Eng­lish­man. After all, given the state of Franco’s garden, it had been given a free run of the place for months. Cesca spot­ted the spider and came to the res­cue. Or at least I thought she did, what she actu­ally did is take a close up photo of the little blighter on her ever present camera:

“Thanks darling, big help.”

She laughed.

“Franco!” I called, “Look what I have found.”

Franco came over to look at the killer spider. He con­sidered it for a few seconds.

“Oh yeah, the garden is full of ‘em”. He then picked it up with one hand and chucked it away. Like it was a wood­louse, not like it was a dan­ger­ous spider. Cesca and I were amazed. What is it with Aus­trali­ans and dan­ger­ous anim­als? They have no fear what­so­ever. Is it that you simply have to get used to them? Or per­haps Franco’s near death escape from the desert had made him feel invul­ner­able? I don’t know, but he didn’t hes­it­ate at all, one second the spider was in charge and the next it was flung through the air, prob­ably won­der­ing why it had bothered get­ting up this morning!

The one where Basho meets the biggest spider in the world, in Laos

In 2002 sci­ence dis­covered the worlds largest spider. It was a great day for sci­ence. Deep in the caves of the coun­try of Laos, lived a real mon­ster. A local vari­ety of large and aggress­ive spider, com­mon in Asia and Aus­tralasia, known as the Giant Cave Huntsman.

The giant hunts­man spider (Het­ero­poda max­ima, from max­imus, mean­ing “the largest”) is a spider of the Het­ero­poda genus. It is con­sidered in a Decem­ber 2008 WWF report as “the world’s largest Hunts­man spider. “^{[2] WIKIPEDIA}

This genus of spider is fam­ous for a num­ber of reas­ons, firstly it is large. Secondly, it is mean. Thirdly, it is fast as hell. The aver­age Hunts­man encounter is over in two seconds, as the hap­less human comes face to fang with one and screams, by the time the sound has reflec­ted off the corner of the room and made it back to your ears, the spider will have star­ted his jet engines. A hor­rible scrab­bling, scrap­ing sound, a blur of speed and an eight legged bolt for the door. If you are stand­ing in the way of the spiders jump-to-lightspeed then you may well get bit­ten. I remem­ber the descrip­tion of the beast in the Aus­tralian book of spiders; it simply read, “Ready biter.” Any­thing that is a ready biter is not my kind of pet­ting animal, no mat­ter how many, or how few, legs it has.

Luck­ily being bit­ten by one is not fatal nor par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous, it just hurts like hell. Well, that’s OK then!

So, in these caves, sci­ent­ists dis­covered some­thing new, some­thing huge. Of course, this was science’s dis­cov­ery of the beast, the loc­als have been put­ting up with them for gen­er­a­tions stretch­ing back to the stone age, but since they don’t know any Latin they don’t count. The Hunts­man is impossible to miss, even when not super-sized. It has longer front legs that curve around in a par­tic­u­lar way, hence you cant mis­take one for some­thing else. These sci­ent­ists, explor­ing the caves, came across the Laos Cave Hunts­man and, after a large scream and prob­ably a brandy, announced it to he world in triumph.

I have some­thing to tell them. Drop the “Cave” part of the name.

Cesca passed me a drink, as we were start­ing early. We all were. Our little group of 7 party anim­als had arisen at 6am on this spe­cial day. We were seated in a make­shift wooden bar on the bank of a Mekong trib­u­tary river, about 12 miles north of the Lao­tian town of Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is roughly half way down Laos and a fam­ous stop­over on the back­packer trail. In fact, it holds a cer­tain amount of awe and dread. Any­one over 28 (myself and Cesca excluded) pretty much hates it, while any­one under 25 con­siders it heaven. This is because the city exists for pretty much only one reason; hedon­istic partying.

The plan was simple. We were going tubing, which I had been assured by my Irish friend Colin was the, “best time I ever had, and I’m not jok­ing”. I had no doubt, since the premise had a lot of oppor­tun­ity for fun. Tubing is when you hire an inflated lorry inner tube, about 4ft across, and sit upon it as you float down the river back to the town. That’s the idea. The real­ity is that around 20 shack like bars con­tain­ing swings, mud pools and buck­ets of strong drink, had taken up res­id­ence on the riverb­anks lin­ing the route. So, tubing basic­ally involves drink­ing all day, float­ing from bar to bar and dan­cing with a lot of drunk girls wear­ing only bikinis.

Maybe, Colin had a point; this was going to be fun.

We were mak­ing an early start on the drink­ing before even get­ting a foot wet. Bob­bits and Lenin had steered the rest of us into the bar next to the start point and bought a round of drinks. I didn’t mind, as the bar was right on the banks of the river and I could see across to the stun­ning Karst moun­tains of Laos. The view is amaz­ingly beau­ti­ful as the moun­tains jut out of the flat fields and reach straight up to the sky. The sun was rising behind them and coro­nas glowed around the tops, high above the plains.

Cesca and I watched and then smiled to each other.

“I read,” I said, “that dur­ing the war, the Viet­namese army and the Com­mun­ist Lao­tians hid in those mountains.”

“Cool, are there caves?” she asked.

“Accord­ing to Lenin’s book he lent me, yes, huge deep caves. They are about 2 miles away from here, I’d say. Many are not fully explored. There could be any­thing in them. Per­haps we can go visit them before we leave Vang Vieng?”

Cesca arched an eye­brow, “Bats?”

I shrugged and supped my drink. It was hella’strong.

Cesca eyed her drink and chuckled, “Yes, I would like that, but let’s see how we feel tomor­row.” She then looked straight at me, “No bats.”

Lenin spoke up, “Best to use the toi­lets before we get on the tubes.”

“Good idea,” I said fin­ish­ing my drink. “I bet they’re out back. Baggsy’ first,” and I rushed off ahead.

Sure enough around the back of the bar was the tra­di­tional Laos toi­let block. Four cubicle shacks made out of uneven planks of wood with a straw roof to keep off the rain. Like a cargo cult of a phone­box. I pushed open the creak­ing door of the first one. A basic Asian toi­let, little more than a hole in the ground awaited me. No light or any toi­let roll. Just a bucket. Sigh­ing, I squeezed into the small dark and foul smelling hut, pushed the door closed and squat­ted over the hole. I was hum­ming to myself tune­lessly in the dark gloom when I heard the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion out­side the toilet:

“F*cking Hell!” came the voice of Lenin. He soun­ded genu­inely shocked.

“Look at that one!” said Mariluz. She soun­ded revolted.

“Bloody hell,” came Cesca’s wor­ried tones, “I am glad I am not in that cubicle!”

“It must be the biggest spider I have ever seen!” reit­er­ated Lenin.

Spider! The word was like ice down my back. They were stand­ing out­side my cubicle. With a creep­ing ter­ror I looked slowly up. Above my head, so close that it is mir­acle I didn’t catch it with my hair when I entered, was the biggest spider in the world. What was imme­di­ately clear to me was that is was look­ing dir­ectly back at me. the Laos Cave Hunts­man, always posed to run or bite, was con­sid­er­ing his options.

It was lucky that I was in my cur­rent pos­i­tion, because this rev­el­a­tion was like like a jolt of elec­tri­city through my body and I invol­un­tar­ily let out a small mam­malian whim­per. Surely the same whim­per two legged creatures have been mak­ing in sim­ilar situ­ations since the dawn of time.

“Basho!” came Lenin, “Are you in that one?” He laughed out loud.

“Look up darling,” said Cesca.

I tried to talk and look ined­ible at the same time, only gib­ber­ish came from my lips, “Bwwwwahhhh…”

“Yep, that’s Basho,” said Cesca.

I quickly fin­ished my busi­ness and pulled up my trousers. Still squat­ting I waddled out of the toi­let. My friends saw my hor­ri­fied face and could not stifle a laugh. I stood and turned to see the mon­ster hanging over the hutch.

“What the smeg is that thing? Its huge!” I said try­ing des­per­ately to look nonchalant.

“Dunno, but I think it wanted to eat you,” laughed Lenin.

The rest of the crew elec­ted to go in the other cubicles and after­wards they for­got the mon­ster and got on with enjoy­ing the day.

Enjoy it we did, but I can­not look at the fol­low­ing video of us sit­ting in the bar without remem­ber­ing the spider look­ing at me as I looked at him.

The one where Basho vis­its Spiderville, Cambodia

It all came about when our Laos trav­el­ling com­pan­ions decided to fly out of Siem Reap in Cam­bodia; over 28 hours away.. They left the jour­ney as late as pos­sible so that they could make a final rush for the air­port (they were fly­ing to Aus­tralia) and sleep on the flight. The last thing they thought we would do is join them. Our sens­ible option would have been to enter Cam­bodia at a slower pace and then take a week or so to work our way around to Siem Reap, but we decided that we wanted to be at Angkor Wat for Christ­mas day and so the mis­sion was on for us all.

The first chal­lenge was the bor­der cross­ing. The south­ern Laos bor­der has, until recently, been closed. The latest Lonely Planet edi­tion makes no men­tion of being able to get through at this point. How­ever, the enter­pris­ing Lao­tians have real­ised that open­ing the bor­der here will expo­nen­tially increase the tour­ists com­ing down to the 4000 Islands region. The effect is to turn this quiet back­wa­ter sec­tion of the Mekong, seen by only the com­plet­ist, to a bust­ling West­ern haven for those cross­ing into Cambodia.

Bust­ling is good for money but what dam­age will it do to the area?

The private bus com­pan­ies are all for this change and many deals have sprung up for easy trans­port to Cam­bod­ian cit­ies. We chose to take a bus at $20 a head. It star­ted with a boat ride out of the water locked islands fol­lowed by mul­tiple small 12-seater trans­ports to the bor­der. The bor­der guards inspec­ted our Laos Visa’s and entry cards and pen­al­ised all who had lost them (the vast major­ity of the Vang Vieng Crowd), then they poin­ted out down a simple road to Cam­bodia. As Cesca and I walked I could not help but ima­gine snipers watch­ing our every move, and so we danced across the line “More­cambe & Wise style”, just to show them.

On the other side we were ushered into a more trans­ports and then onto a lar­ger bus. The usual frauds were in oper­a­tion about chan­ging cur­rency, which involves a con­fid­ence trick in con­vin­cing you that any Lao­tian cur­rency can­not be changed any­where else on your trip. This is, of course, rub­bish and the rate being offered is very bad. How­ever, the rate all over Cam­bodia is bad and the best idea is to change all your Kip to US Dol­lars before enter­ing Cam­bodia at all. The real jour­ney then began in earn­est. The north east of Cam­bodia is per­haps the most un-touristed area, and for us it was passing by in flashes out the win­dow. Trekking is avail­able here, but like in all of this war rav­aged coun­try, step­ping off the path can be deadly.

We arrived that night in the dark­ness of the cap­ital. There are very few times that I allow a tout to select my hotel for me but this was one of them, as we had no idea where about we were. The hotel was actu­ally quite good and obvi­ously had a large crowd of tour­ists stay­ing. We crashed out and awaited the next day.

The next day came with an unwel­come change of bus. This new bus was stacked with wood. That is to say, the entire inside of the bus, under every chair and in every nook and cranny, were large planks of wood that had been stacked and were tak­ing up all the room. For a tall man this made the jour­ney even more dis­tress­ing. Now the bus plied its way up the west­ern side of Cam­bodia towards our final destination.

All busses make stops, but the stop here was one I will not forget.

Spiderville is very well named. The bus stopped and we all piled off to stretch our legs. I was quite sleepy and did not take a clear look at the food items proffered by the lady tout sit­ting out­side. It was only when my mind grabbed my eyes and fixed them onto the thing crawl­ing on the young lady’s arm that I real­ised she was selling deep-fried Tarantulas.

Tarantu­las com­prise a group of hairy and often very large spiders belong­ing mainly to the fam­ily Ther­a­phosidae, of which approx­im­ately 900 spe­cies have been iden­ti­fied. His­tor­ic­ally tarantu­las were the big­ger gen­era from the fam­ily Lyc­osidae (like Lyc­osa tarantula) WIKIPEDIA

And that one had obvi­ously escaped:

She saw my eyes widen, “You want spider?” She said while pulling the arach­nid back into place as it tried to scamper up her top. She then pulled it off and offered it to me, legs a-wiggling.

“Err, no. No thanks very much, I am fine,” I man­aged to say back­ing away slightly.

The girl was sit­ting down on a bucket, which I thought was only her chair.

It was not.

She took my hes­it­ance to mean that I did not want this par­tic­u­lar spider and so she stood up from the bucket and showed me her selec­tion inside. Twenty of the mon­sters were all tum­bling over each other to be my deep fried food choice.

“Bwah­hhh,” was an accur­ate trans­la­tion of my reply and I quickly moved on.

The next girl was selling deep fried spiders too and had a pile of paprika col­oured crawl­ers on a tray on her head.

After a few fur­ther spiders sellers I was able to pur­chase a Coke and make my way back onto the bus. A few brave souls bought one to eat and a large offer­ing was passed around the bus. Lenin, our trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, tried a leg but I passed it on:

“Sorry, I’m try­ing to cut down…”

The one where Basho is offered spider for break­fast in Thailand

We were driven to a sta­ging area and then picked up by our guide and a local vil­la­ger. He arrayed us with water and then we were off into the jungle. Trekking is some­thing Cesca and I love. It gets you out of not only your com­fort zone, but out of your men­tal map of your­self. You are immersed in the sights and sounds of the trek and have plenty of time to think. This was real trekking. The vil­la­ger spoke almost no Eng­lish, but our ever-helpful guide trans­lated splen­didly. The jungle was all around us and I could not see that we were fol­low­ing any sort of recog­nis­able path through it. After a while, the vil­la­ger cut us down some bam­boo and fash­ioned us some walk­ing sticks, some­thing that really helped. We crossed swell­ing rivers, went up and down rocky slopes, through val­leys, up hills and every­where the jungle was all around. No signs of human life. I really felt that we were really in the mix. Of course, we were prob­ably only a thick bush away from Star­bucks, but it felt real. What also felt real was at one point we were cross­ing this giant fallen log, using it as a bridge over a massive drop, when the vil­la­ger and guide both froze. In front of us was an enorm­ous snake that spot­ted us and slithered into the under­growth. It was about 5 feet long and looked to me like some sort of pit Viper with its arrow like head and hiss­ing out a warn­ing to us. It dis­ap­peared and our hearts stopped ham­mer­ing in our chests. Relieved and laugh­ing a little we all continued.

About 7 hours later, we came to a stream. There the vil­la­ger stopped and made some cups from bam­boo (I still have mine). Into these, he poured some local fire­wa­ter and we drank each other’s health. It was strong stuff and that is put­ting it mildly. He then led us onwards and out of the jungle into pas­tures. Through these and onwards to a small pur­pose built wooden village.

This was arrayed with bam­boo huts into which we depos­ited our gear. To wash we went down to the river and washed stand­ing in the freez­ing waters. Not the safest thing I have ever done, but I was at least clean.

Then we went and helped with din­ner. Other vil­la­gers arrived and one man played a strange stringed instru­ment as we helped pre­pare the food. Wok cook­ing is a favour­ite of mine and we soon got stuck in fry­ing all the vari­ous dishes. Din­ner was won­der­ful and as the night drew in, we went to bed in our hut, idly won­der­ing about Spiders and bed bugs.

The next morn­ing, we were up and at them at an ungodly hour. I am not the most morn­ing ori­ent­ated of people and struggle to wake up. This morn­ing, they had what must be the ulti­mate way of sober­ing me up but not in a good way. The guide called me over to a mud bank where the vil­la­ger was viol­ently dig­ging out a hole in the ground. It looked vaguely familiar.

“What is he doing?” I asked.

There fol­lowed a rat­tling con­ver­sa­tion in the local dia­lect, which is a little bit Thai and a little bit some­thing else.

“The guide turned to me and motioned the hole, “He find­ing you spider.”

“Spider!” I exclaimed.

“You say last night, you like spider, so he find you one.”

My recol­lec­tion had been that I had indic­ated a cer­tain level of reluct­ance on the part of spiders in my room. Quite how this turned into me want­ing to see one was lost to me. How­ever, before I could stop him the viol­ent dig­ging hal­ted and the vil­la­ger was now pok­ing a slim stick into the hole.

I was fas­cin­ated to see how he flicked the stick in a cer­tain way and ground it around the hole, but I could not see into it myself. Sud­denly he cried out and jumped back as an enorm­ous and very angry spider came out of the hole.

Spiders are nat­ur­ally noc­turnal and this big fella’ had been woken from his morn­ing slum­bers by someone knock­ing down his home and drag­ging him out by force. He reared up and waved his legs menacingly.

I instinct­ively took a step back. He was huge and black and about the size of Cesca’s hand. I would bet that he was some sort of Tarantula, but I don’t know. The vil­la­ger was not so hampered by fear and he pushed the stick under the beast and flicked it up and out of the hole, onto the bank. The spider made a dash for it, but the vil­la­ger was ready and it reared again. Fangs the size and shape of clipped toe nails juddered as he tried to scare us off. The Vil­la­ger was hav­ing none of it and with a very deft and prac­ticed move­ment, he slapped the stick down on the spiders back and pinned it to the floor. He then rushed up the stick and grabbed the spider from the back hold­ing it down. He then gripped it in a cer­tain way, obvi­ously some sort of spider jujutsu hold, and lif­ted it up in his hand. The spider was totally in his con­trol. Sat­is­fied, he smiled, walked over and thrust the strug­gling giant arach­nid in my face.

“You touch, please” said the guide. Gingerly I reached out. “Not there! He bites you. Leg.” My hand froze and I adjus­ted my aim. I felt one of the large foot­pads. It was amaz­ingly soft and not all spiky. Kind of like rough felt or a good shag car­pet. “Now you,” he said indic­at­ing that Cesca should also stroke the strug­gling arach­nid. Gingerly she put for­wards a hand but the wav­ing legs meant that she closed her eyes as she did so.

“That’s his balls you’re hold­ing,” I poin­ted out.

She yelped and opened her eyes; sure enough, she was grop­ing the poor creature’s spin­ner­ets. “Urrg!” she exclaimed.

The vil­la­ger smiled, laughed, and put the spider down on the ground. The spider obvi­ously did not quite know what to make of all this and even­tu­ally decided to make a run for it, pos­sibly to call a con­stable and report being moles­ted. The vil­la­ger rattled off some­thing in his local lan­guage, which the guide trans­lated for us.

“He say, you lucky his father not guide today. He eat spider.”

Both Cesca and I made the same face of disgust.

“What, raw?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Can we have some­thing else for breakfast?”

“Yes, come, fruit ready.”

Epi­logue

So, there you have them. In one year away, you are always going to get involved with things that are out­side your com­fort zones, but for me these five encoun­ters have had a big effect on my life. I’m not talk­ing about my fear of spiders, that is still the same and I still kill rather than cap­ture rogue spiders in my house, instead I am talk­ing about some of the won­der­ful people in these stor­ies. Franco, Lenin, Bob­bits, The vil­la­ger, the lady out­side the bus, these are the things that I will remem­ber. These are the things I cherish.

Don’t stay at home just because you may have to face some­thing that ter­ri­fies you. As you have read, I came close to some of the most dan­ger­ous spiders in the world and didn’t get bit­ten, they are not creatures to be feared. Rather they should be admired. Up close, the world’s spiders are really quite amaz­ing. They are almost, and I hes­it­ate to sug­gest this, quite beau­ti­ful. The won­der of nature is that this small and intel­li­gent creature has been around the Earth for mil­lions of years. They have been our eight legged com­pan­ion for a thou­sand gen­er­a­tions, and they will be with us on this jour­ney for a thou­sand more.

Just, hope­fully, not attached to my testicles next time.

Regards,

Basho

Pop­ular­ity: 12% [?]

Related Posts

• Laos P.D.R. – Mekong mean­der­ings
  “Life is a musical thing and you’re sup­posed to sing or dance along the way”…
• Laos PDR – his­tory & heart
  Our Jour­ney con­tin­ues into the Heart of South East Asia: Laos!…
• The Amer­ican War
  The after effects of the war in South East Asia…
• Lets go tubing! A Basho Film
  “Lets go tubing!” This video high­lights the crazy day my friends and I had while tubing the legendar…
• Palaces of Hue, Viet­nam. Lost in time.
  What is left after the Amer­ican bomb­ing of Hue is not much, but it is still beau­ti­ful. Th…
• Laos, the gem of Indoch­ina – a cul­tural con­nec­tion
  The miss­ing Laos post by Cesca is found…