AUSTRALIA
Locals reassured me that the recent rains had encouraged the animals not to stray from the interiour; that water being plentiful gave them no reason to come to the road to find moisture. Where the water runs from the convex surface of the road to where it joins the dirt, fresh green roots grow and at times of drought animals go there to feed. So myth has it, kangaroos hari-kari in front of motorcycles for two reasons; one, the long monotonal sound of an engine approaching employs the Doppler effect which, when changing in tone from faraway to close-up in a gently smooth logarithmic curve, this allows the animal to know precisely where you are, even from a distance of several miles. The moment the rider sees the animal, he brakes, closes down the engine, the sound disperses differently and the animal can no longer track the continuous signal; second; being nocturnal, his daylight vision is poor so when he sees the oncoming headlamps he is completely blinded and already in panic he jumps any which way and if there are enough animals, given that there are a variation of four ways to jump, your mortality is reduced to an absolute survival factor of 25%. Statistics show that a person would have to travel on an airline flight every day for 35 000 years to be assured of being in an accident. The survival factor of actually dying from an aeroplane crash is estimated at 82% whilst 100% of all truck drivers told me that in their considerable experience, a motorcyclist who actually hit a large roo has a 100% chance of being killed. Riding at 80 kph I saw two small sets of ears, nothing more, peak out of a perfectly camouflaged landscape and it was certain there would be another hundred nearby, or a thousand, and it reminded me to slow down further.