The not so itsy bitsy spiders

Australia is a mystical land where spiders rule the earth as man's equal. Here, spiders can be hairier than a gorilla, gargantuan or miniscule beyond reason, as colorful as a vegas showgirl, as hidden as your darkest secret, and venomous enough to kill Chuck Norris.

This blog entry is dedicated to the three encounters I have had with some of the most terrifying spiders I have seen in the wild.

Spider One: Shaped kind of like a St. Andrew's Cross spider, but the pattern is totally different. No Aussie has been able to identify it, or has seen anything like it.

So I was on a group tour of the Uni campus, and after a long day of trekking through the unforgiving heat I began to feel fatigued. Desperate for relief, I sought the sturdy shaded stone column just a step to my left. It was perfectly located. I could lean on it while still within a socially acceptable range of our tour guide. I went for it. Eager to get the weight off my suffering feet, I scanned the surface as I leaned in. And there it was. I saw that spider right where my shoulder would have landed. I stopped dead in my tracks. Actually, that's a lie. I had already committed to my movement, so stopping/backpedaling just made me clumsily totter and trip before regaining my balance (and my cool). The worst part is, there would have been a direct collision, which I would assume could kill the spider that was as long as my index finger. And the impending doom did not cause the spider to do so much as flinch. Maybe that means it could have handled me. To be honest, I don't know if the spider was venomous, or even dangerous at all for that matter, but the way that spider stood its ground really made me question my chances of survival had I leaned on the wall.

Spider Two: Not afraid of heights. Also unidentified.

I am at the top of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne enjoying the view of the city from 88 floors up when one of my Danish friends (still taunting my from my last spider encounter) tells me to look at the spider right outside the window i was next to. Of course I laugh it off (humor tends to be my default defense mechanism) and make a point of getting pretty close to the window. And then I realized they weren't joking. I looked out the window and sure enough, 88 floors up, there is a spider outside blowing in the wind struggling to spin its web. So I start making jokes about how that spider is going to starve, because no food source is going to get caught in a web that elevated. And then I looked up the side of the building and saw that this spider had dozens and dozens of webs in every cranny of the building that extended meters above us. By the looks of this guy's condo complex, anyone could tell that this was one powerful spider. And ironically enough, unless of course he did it on purpose, this spider was building his impressive architectural webs on one of the most well known architectural icons of the city.

Spider Three: The Huntsman Spider (Note: this picture was taken from Google images because I was too distracted by the huge spider that was about to kill me to take my own picture at the time)

I'm at the Suzuki night market (Queen Victoria Market on Wednesday nights during the summer) having an awesome time looking at the open air market booths, checking out the street food, and listening to the live music when all of a sudden the sky opens up and it starts pouring. A lot of people started leaving, but my group of friends ran for cover and hung out until it was dry enough to go back out. Unfortunately, there was only so much shelter for hundreds of people, so we ended up on a bench pretty far away from the party. I'm meeting some people for the first time when all of a sudden I see a HUGE huntsman spider come out from behind the bench going towards one of my new friends' hair. I start screaming and I pull her off the bench and point at the spider. Expecting similar reactions from the girl, who almost had a spider's nest in her hair, as well as my friends just outside the danger zone I was completely laughed at. You see, huntsman spiders are huge, hairy, yellow, and completely harmless. I knew that they were harmless because they explained in orientation that they often get into homes and that we shouldn't freak out. But do I want any spider, even a harmless one, in my friend's hair? Whatever. They can laugh, but I saved her from a scarred life.