After spending the day chilling in Yamba we went for a walk by the beach around sunset. All was good until we decided to walk back by the lighthouse. All of a sudden I felt something on my leg so I looked down and saw a fly on me. No dramas (as they say over here). Then I felt a second one and so took a closer look and realised the little fella was a massive mozzie quite happily tucking into me! I turn to Ruth to say and she’s surrounded by them, then I realise I am too - not good.
The little buggers have quite a nip on them and I ended up slapping quite a few only to find out that they can take quite a bit of blood for their size. We started running but they kept up. We managed to get about 200 metres away before the swarm left us alone but I still had a load on me. Ruth had to wipe over 20 off my back. We were glad to get out of there.
As we were running we passed a couple of people who were laughing at us. They didn’t laugh for long as they walked straight into the ones that were following us and got attacked too. I call that karma.
On the short walk my feet start itching, I look down and they had started swelling and I had several white lumps about the size of a 2p coin where I’d been bitten. Then the ones on my arms started coming up. We got back to the hostel and I took some antihistamine. This seemed to slow things down after a while but then my neck, hips and arms started coming up all red and bubbly. After a few minutes Ruth took a look and decided to call the Drs at the local hospital who asked for me to come in. Luckily Justin and Kelly (2 of the hostel owners) took us to the hospital in Maclean (a Scottish town!) about 20 mins away where they dosed me up on some steroids and seriously strong antihistamine. Apparently I had mild anaphylactic shock which, I’ve now discovered first hand, isn’t nice.
The swelling took about a week to go down, much to the Aussies amusement, and the bites about 2 weeks. Since then the hostel sell mozzie repellent! According to the locals the mozzies are known as Scotch Greys. They were about 3 or 4 times the size of the normal mozzies, which normally don’t give us much of a problem, and quite vicious. They aren’t normally around but we had a warm wind that day that must have brought them in as a few other people had seen them on around Yamba on the same day. Hopefully we won’t see them again.
