Flies

We heard a lot about flies in Australia and we were warned. However, what we faced in the Blue Mountains was far away from anything we could imagine. The strong wind coming from the West brought millions of flies from the sheep farms to the hiking paradise Blue Mountains. While we were on a mountain bike tour a whole bunch was attacking us.

You don’t get any stitches from those flies, however they try to get into your mouth, nose, ears. With the normal Aussie salute you cannot get rid of them. That is what we did very much and at the end we gave up. Till we started all over again with Aussie salute. Unbelievable! By the way the Aussie Salute is also called Bush Salute. Every time when 2 people meet in the bush it looks like they were greeting each other, however they only wanted to get rid of the flies…












But why are the flies so aggressive? It almost seems their lives depend on getting in one of orifice of the body. And that is not too far away from the truth. The truth is that the female flies are searching proteins which they need for their eggs to produce the next generation of flies. And those proteins they get from humans (and of course animals) - it is in the blood, sweat and tears and other secretions...










Btw their favorite spot for breeding is cow dung. Just imagine in every cow dung up to 2000 flies emerge and each of the 26.7 millions of cows produces daily 12 dung drops. Well, you can figure out yourself how many flies there are in Australia. Right! An unbelievable high number! 640 billion at least! Oh, Boy!