Herbie got stung by a wasp on Sunday.
He screamed bloody murder when he was playing with a gang of kids at the school and took off without telling anyone what was wrong.
He came tearing into the house and, after inspecting him for obvious signs of blood gushing or wounds I managed to elicit from him that it was his foot that was hurting.
The poor kid – the wasps on Cocos are brutal and aggressive.
The Macao paper wasp will repeatedly sting you and are apparently attracted to stinging in the same spot more than once. The kids here claim the more you get stung the more it hurts. They are also aggressive.
These blighters were not always here. About 4 years ago they were imported from Asia, presumably on a cargo ship.
It’s no wonder biosecurity is now taken so seriously and, word on the street is, more rules are on the way to keep the nasties out.
This focus on keeping the place largely pest-free is why our sea container has now been sitting on the dock for the past week, awaiting inspection. With a tropical low pressure system hanging around somewhere within cooee the rain is further holding up attempts to get it to us.
As far as I can glean, before this most recent voyage, containers were delivered to the owners’ house where the biosecurity inspectors would attend and inspect the goods as you unloaded it. They are mostly looking for things that might be harbouring insects like our mower or bikes.
From what I can glean they take any suspect items and treat them to ensure we don’t introduce the red back spider or something equally nasty to these pristine little islands.
A new biosecurity inspection point is under construction. This will bring Cocos closer into line with Australian standards.
In about June this year the containers will be delivered to a specially constructed pad inside a man-proof fence where they will be off limits to pesky and increasingly desperate owners like me.
For now the rules are somewhere between the old situation and the new situation. The container has to be emptied on site at Rumah Baru where it will be inspected.
Seems pretty straight forward but no one but the Coop staff are allowed to assist with unpacking and my engineer husband has that thing locked down with so many ratchet straps it looks like a spider web. My understanding is they opened it up, took one look at it and closed it again. The stevedores are not keen at all – it will be a bloody big job just to undo all those straps, not to mention the fact the boat is literally nailed to the floor!
Meanwhile we continue to spend $100 per day on food and some of the pantry goods in our container will soon be out of date.
Another container landed the same time as ours and is being unpacked first. They also have a huge boat in there piled high with cardboard boxes of food. Friday the boat was taken out of their container and that is where it stayed, all weekend, in the rain. Thankfully the staff affixed a tarp over the whole thing so hopefully nothing got wrecked and the Cocos rats stayed away.
The sympathy of the locals for our plight is directly commiserate with the amount of time they have lived here. Old timers will immediately tell grim tales of some unfortunate family who waited for 6 months, a year. Or they will launch into tales of their own wait for a package ordered in June last year. I’m expecting someone to say that such and such completed their 2 year contract and left before their stuff turned up!
I did hear another absolute horror story of a family who arrived at a similar time to us to Home Island. Their stuff has also arrived but they will have to wait for it to be unloaded here and transported across to Home Island box by box, via the ferry!
Related posts
Cocos kids 
1 thought on “Sting in the tail”