by Susan Berran
We dove out of the pipe opening, head first . . . sploosh! Over the rocks and into the sand, ploughing our faces into the disgusting stream of SLIMY garbage and the stinky goop from the pipe. I felt bottles and cartons and other garbage continue to fall onto me, together with the sludge and other gooky crap.
We both rolled over and found ourselves blinded by the sudden sunlight and facing up straight into the mouth of the pipe. Our eyes were gunked up with thick sand and goop. Everything was totally fuzzy.
Suddenly there it was in the mouth of the pipe …
“AAArrrrHHHHH!! ”
It leapt! Landing right on top of us and smooshing us into the gross sand even further. We rolled about in the slimy slosh, screaming and fighting to get it off before being ripped to shreds with the mi razor sharp teeth and CLAWS … you know … it didn’t really hurt that much. Actually it wasn’t hurting at all.
Was I dead already?
I began wiping the goop from my eyes. Slowly I could make out a couple of fuzzy old ladies standing over us … my eyes were still blurry. The oldies were staring right at us, mouths wide open. I looked at Jared, who was still screaming and rolling about beside me. Then I grabbed him by the nostrils and he immediately stopped screaming, opened his eyes and looked all around as well.
Without a word spoken the two of us stood up, brushed ourselves off and began to walk away from the little old ladies.
“Oh boys …” one called. “You forgot your blow-up pool-toy crocodile!”
rumble rumble burble burble …
That noise, that growl! We went around
in circles trying to look for where the sound was coming from.
“Aren’t you going to answer your phone boys?” urged the other lady.
Yep, I grabbed Jared and reached into his backpack.
“Yes Mum, we’re coming Mum. Sorry Mum. No, we didn’t notice it ringing Mum.”
Back at the hotel, Mum was waiting for us as we walked in through the door. We must have looked like two HALF-DEAD, clay ZOMBIE statues, with dry sludge and sand covering our bodies, cracking and breaking away in great, crusty clumps.
I don’t know whether it was because she’d just woken up or what, but Mum was unusually pleased. Pleased that we’d kept ourselves busy while her and little miss nappy bucket. Smelly Melly had been able to get a rest all day!I mean … hello! We looked like we’d just fought off death … BECAUSE WE HAD!
Anyway, Mum didn’t seem to notice how we looked! Actually, quite the opposite of what we expected; She rewarded us! With a really mental looking smile on her face, she told us how for our last day there, she’d already arranged for us all to take a final little trip together. We were going out to this fantastic wildlife safari park. And she reckoned that she had something really special lined up. But there was something about the way she said, final trip , and really special that bothered me. Now I was more than a little bit worried.
That night I suggested to Jared that maybe we should take a little protection with us. You know … just in case. Because after all, safari parks have wild animals and accidents can happen. So we grabbed a few more essentials for our utility belts and shoved them into our backpacks, just in case we needed them.
The next day, we headed off straight after breakkie. Over the mountains, through the bush and out onto the open plains. Giant anthills, as tall as basketball players, were scattered all around, like chicken pox on the landscape, with dry, spindly bushes and cacti thrown in all over the place, just to keep things interesting.
It was hard to believe that anything, or anyone, was living all the way out there. When we finally found the turn-off and pulled into the car park, a lone tumbleweed rolled right across our path. There were no other cars, nothing, ABSOLUTELY NO-ONE else around at all. Jared looked across to me with an obviously worried face. We decided that this was all starting to look more than just a little bit suss. Maybe the pamphlet we’d seen was really old and the place had long since shut down. Maybe the animals had somehow escaped and already ‘TAKEN CARE’ of the keepers. Maybe we should just stay in the car for a little while longer. Or maybe this really was … Mum’s last chance to ‘ditch’ us!
But Mum didn’t say a word. She just looked at the both of us with that weird, embarrassing smile again and confidently got little Miss Smelly Melly ‘I’m-the-centre-of-the-universe’ Prissy Pants out of the car. As we threw the backpacks over our shoulders, I noticed that Mum was already heading off in a real hurry. She just took off, disappearing along a dirt track and into the bushes.
All of a sudden, we heard this incredibly DEEP, THUNDEROUS GROWLING sound.
ROAR … ROOOAAAAAAR! It was close, really, really close! And it was NOT someone’s mobile phone. We were stepping on Mum’s heels in less than two seconds flat. It sounded something like a sabre-toothed bear, a grizzly TIGER, or a LOCH NESS lion. We had no way of knowing what it was for sure, but anything that makes THAT sort of noise can’t be good.
The overgrown track led up to a tucked away little ‘palm hut’ sort of café, that appeared to be the entrance. Cobwebs hung across the corners of the dark doorway, like spooky wind chimes, swinging about in the gentle breeze. Then, just as we stepped through the entrance …
… ROAR … ROOOAAAAAR!
IT WAS RIGHT BEHIND US!
I took off straight for the toilet, SLAMMED the door and locked it behind me. It was not only safer in there, but practical as well … just in case. Jared was leaping out of his skin and squealing like a pig asked to turn on the barbecue and hold an apple in its mouth. He started bashing on the toilet door, but there was only room in there for one – me - so he dove under one of the cafe tables. I knew he was there, I could hear the cutlery and glasses shaking.
A few seconds later, something occurred to me. Mum and whatshername … you know, the little stinky one. … I hadn’t heard any screaming. There should have been some earth-shattering girly screaming. I unlocked the door and cautiously opened it, just a crack. There was Mum and little Miss ‘pain-in-the-butt’, standing at the counter and paying the lady. Just then a couple more tourists walked in, and just as they came through the doorway … ROAR
… ROOOAAAAAR! what the … ? It was a stupid door sensor recording!
Ha! I knew that! Mum looked across and gave me this dumb smile.
“What … I wasn’t scared. I was just on my way to the toilet anyway!” When I suddenly lifted the tablecloth where Jared was hiding with his eyes squashed closed and his hands over his head, he just about fainted. He was soooo pale, I thought he was going to puke on the spot. And now he really truly needed the toilet as well.
Inside the shop were all sorts of cutesy little soft toys, puzzles and souvenirs for sale. Yep; just as we thought. This place was going to be really lame. Surprise my butt! That was just to get us dragged here without complaining. It was just one of those tiny, little, itsy, bitsy, baby animal petting zoos. Terrific, the last day of our holiday and we were going to get stuck at Old McDonald’s Boring Baby cutesy wutesy zoo. Making baby animal goo-goo sounds and teaching Prissy Pants their sooky names, because everyone knows that calling a ‘sheep’ a ‘sheep’ is as scary as jamming your fingers into a BLENDER. So we must call it a ‘baa baa lamb’. And pigs aren’t piglets, nooo, they’re ‘piggy wiggies’, COWS are ‘moo moos’ and then there’s ‘ducky wuckys’, ‘gee gees’ and so on.
No doubt somewhere around the place there was going to be a little, teeny, tiny merry-go-round. Probably the size of a toilet bowl with a gee gee on one side and a fishy wishy on the other. Yeah, we’d been conned!
At least we didn’t have to have a ‘leash’ attached between us and Mum. We were allowed to go wander and explore the park, as long as we met back there in two hours EXACTLY. Gee thanks Mum!
But it wasn’t all bad. The place was almost total bush. The tracks were thin, bare dirt, barely wide enough for the two of us. Within minutes there was no sight, sound or smell of Mum and Smelly Melly Stinky Pants. At least th
at was a bright side. Finally the path opened out in front of us and there stood a simple wooden fence. Another chain-link fence stood a couple of metres high right behind it and then disappeared over a rise in both directions. Obviously you were supposed to stay behind the wooden fence so that you didn’t get too close to the wire one. Yeah, because otherwise the invisible BLOOD-SUCKING, FLESH-TEARING, BONE-CRUNCHING DRAGON might get you.
WOW! There was a whole lot of nothing in there. Oooooh, check out the dangerous weeds trying to take over the fascinating dirt. Whoopee.
But then Jared saw something … OH NO!! It was the rare and wild man-eating … JERSEY COW.
It was laying down in the dirt behind a boulder, in amongst some weedy bushes. We could really only see its tan backside, but we’d seen enough cow butts in Agnath to know that this was the ‘ferocious dumbus buttus’ JERSEY COW. We took out our Mini Pellet Pooper Shooters and took careful aim …
… pttt pttt pttt, pttt.
Rats missed! There was no-one around so we ducked under the wooden fence and balanced the pooper shooters through the chain-link fence …
… pttt pttt pttt, … pttt pttt pttt, … pttt pttt … Roar … roooaaaar! Snarl!!
“AAArrrrrrH!!” Slash!
It leapt STRAIGHT AT US! The hugest lion in the world pounced from behind the rock where it had obviously been feasting on the REMAINS of the JERSEY COW … which we now realised was dead. The lion hit the fence so hard that the chain-link pushed out like a trampoline, sending us both flying backwards towards the ground.
WHAM!
That was a lion! A HUGE, man-eating savage lion. Definitely a ‘Make-us Poopus Biggus’ lion!
We sat there in the dirt for a while, staring at the huge creature before us. He was still SNARLING, with drool zig-zagging its way down the wire as he gnawed on the steel fence, still trying to get to us. I looked across to Jared. He looked like a ghost, he was so deathly pale and snorting as he tried to get air into his lungs. Sweat was washing its way across his face and then falling in HUGE DROPLETS to the ground. He was building up quite a pudde! And as I looked down to his shirt I saw why. The front of his shirt had been sliced open as if by a giant razor blade. The two halves were just flapping about in the breeze. I scrambled across to him, expecting to see his guts hanging out everywhere like a skipping rope, or BLOOD gushing and squirting everywhere like a shaken up bottle of soft drink, or something. But apart from his shirt, all he had was this teeny tiny red mark where just the very tip of the lion’s claw had got him. It was so disappointing. It looked more like a zit than a FEROCIOUS ATTACK by a lion.
Jared still hadn’t said a word and I was so peeved that he wasn’t going to have a scar, or anything, to show the kids back home, but I thought I’d see how deep it was, so I gave it a squeeze. And yep! Just like a zit, it POPPED. About three tinsy drops of blood came out and that was it … PsssT pssst PsssT … THUD!
He fainted!
I knew we should have bought our Single Shot Over Shoulder Boulder Holder with us. One loaded nappy, right in the lion’s moosh … Now that would have been something to see! That lion would have been picking dry Smelly Melly ‘ammunition’ out of its mane for weeks.
We’d made the Boulder Holder from Gran’s undies. Those things are so HUGE that when we weren’t shooting with it, we could use it as a wading pool by day and then a tent by night.
Anyway, after slapping Jared around for a while to get his blood circulating again, we figured that just maybe there was a few interesting animals in the park after all. And maybe we’d just stick to the outside of the wooden fences. After all, that was the rule.
We spent the next hour or so checking out bears, tigers, more lions and some other things with claws the size of buckets and teeth the size of carving knives.
The cheetah looked really bored in its enclosure so we tried to help it out. We took out the Mini Pellet Pooper Shooter … PING!
I hit the side of its house and it immediately took off over tere trying to see what it was. Thok! Jared hit a tree on the other side of the enclosure so then it raced over there. Thud! I hit a tree stump, in a flash it was racing there. Thok! Jared got another tree, the cheetah skidded as it turned again … ping! … house again. We had the cheetah racing from one side of the enclosure to the other, here to there, there to here and then back again. It was scratching all around the place, digging and sniffing. It was running around in circles going crazy trying to find out what was in there. We could tell that it was starting to get really annoyed and peeved off. WOW they can move fast.
We headed off again to see what other animals we could get to do some ‘exercise’, but most of the animals were hidden so well amongst the bushes, that a few times Jared nearly freaked out totally when something suddenly popped up right by him! I wasn’t worried though. But that’s just me. I usually pretend to be scared, just so Jared doesn’t feel so embarrassed.
There were some ‘normal’ zoo animals in there as well. At the monkey enclosure we just sat on a bench and pigged out on some ‘munchies’. A couple of chimps were sitting just on the other side of the fence from where we were and picked fleas off each other. The rest of them were scattered about the enclosure, just sitting on their butts and nodding off to sleep.
SUDDENLY, the chimp on the far side of the enclosure leapt high into the air, as if he’d just been jabbed in the butt with a giant needle … and we didn’t do it! He went straight up in the air about two metres and made this high pitched … yipp! Then the chimp a bit closer to us did the same, straight up into the air with the same … yipp! Then the next one closer to us, and the next, and the next … yipp! … yipp! … yipp! It was like something invisible was running towards us and jabbing each chimp in the butt as it went. Each chimp leapt straight up after the other, like a domino effect or like they were doing the ‘Mexican wave’. We had no idea what was going on. Then as the two closest to us stopped picking fleas, it was like they were waiting for their turn to jump. Yipp!! The two of them went up together. We watched as they landed right by the fence. As we looked down, out through the chain-link fence came a snake, a weird, dusty coloured really fast snake! A DEATH ADDER! One of the world’s most venomous and deadliest! It can strike seven times in under a second.
Yipp!! Me and Jared leapt straight up into the air and landed on the bench in a single bound. In a split second we were standing up there watching the snake speed off through the bush. No wonder the chimps were moving their butts, and if it wasn’t for them, we probably wouldn’t have even seen it coming.
This place made Agnath look like the Garden of Eden.
We headed back to the cafe to meet Mum, but kind of hoping we could just go back to the hotel. Maybe there was still a chance to get home alive. But no. There was still the surprise to come that Mum had mentioned earlier.
We all headed off and down a familiar track, with one of the zookeepers leading the way and Mum still wearing that weird smile. We finally came to an enclosure that me and Jared had already seen. It was where the lemurs were kept. With their little black and white faces, grey fur, and long banded tails … yes they were pretty cute … for a flea-picking, butt-scratching, snot-eating monkey. But then Mum handed me the camera and told us to wait right there, stay quiet and take some shots through the fence. With that, Mum, little Miss ‘my-butt’s-stinkier-than-a-monkey’s’ Melly and the keeper disappeared into the ‘monkey house’. We watched as they then came out inside the enclosure and with the help of the keeper they began to feed and pat the lemurs. There were two of them; Lee and Mur, of course.
This was our surprise!? To watch Smelly Melly and Mum get up close and personal with those guys. Oh great! That was fair … NOT! I was so peeved. But then I figured, ok, maybe it was just two at a time and we’d be next. Yeah, that had to be it.
We’d just about been eaten at the beach by CROCODILEs, attacked by a VICIOUS, VENOMOUS PLANT in the rainforest, nearly had my head ripped off on the river crossing, almost sent plummeting to earth from some of
the tallest trees on earth, outrun some Giant drain monster, attacked by deadly SNAKES and then to top it all off we nearly got SHREDDED by MAN-EATING LION. YEAH, this was our surprise, a nice friendly, gentle, cuddly animal to feed and pat before we left for home.
Jared would be happy, he’d needed to change his undies quite a few times on this trip. Me … fine. I’d pat the cutesy, wutesy little critters, but I would have been happier if it was a lion, or tiger or something. I’d show ‘em who was boss. I’d smack em’ around for knocking over Jared! Yeah I’d wrestle a few and rip a couple of teeth out of them to make a souvenir necklace, but ok I’d cuddle the ‘cutesy’ lemurs just to make Mum and everyone else happy.
But when mum and the others eventually came out of the lemurs’ enclosure, the keeper locked the door behind them. Then Mum, Melly and the keeper headed off in another direction and along another track.
WHAT THE … !!
Now I was really peeved. When we get home … I’m … I’m … I’m not going to wipe the cow poop off my shoes before walking into the house. Mum hates that! And I’ll ‘accidentally’ let Fluff But get into the nappy bucket. She loves to drag the stinky things all around the house, chewing and flicking ‘STUFF’ everywhere. Yeah, and I think that I’ll even …
“YOUR TURN! ” the keeper said suddenly. I’d been thinking so hard that I didn’t even noticed we’d stopped, or where we were. I looked across to Mum, there it was, that weird dumb smile again.
“Give me the camera, away you go,” she said looking at the both of us.
We stepped into an animal ‘HOUSE’. It was really STINKY in there. Kinda of like a month’s pile of sweaty jocks and socks, or sticking your head under the doona when you’ve just let a fart rip in bed. It was dark and cramped. The keeper then locked the door behind us and unlocked the one in front as he picked up a bucket with something in it. As he opened the door the sunlight streamed through and blinded us for a second. We stepped into an enclosure, staying right beside him. Straight away I imagined that we were going to pet the other chimps that we’d watched earlier. Which would be pretty cool, but we’d probably get fleas from them.
