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By Root 495 0

in 1964 at Coffs Harbour, it’s since been joined by scores of oversize creations, from the twelve-ton Giant Koala to the Big Merino, an enormous sheep known to fans as Rambo. There’s the Big Golden Gumboot, the Big Trout, and the Big Cigar. Sometimes the sculptures are cartoonish (the Big Boxing Crocodile); sometimes they’re mundane (the Big Coffee Pot). They can even be scatological—the Big Poo appeared briefly in 2002 as a protest against sewage ocean dumping. But more commonly they celebrate food, as is the case with the Big Oyster, Big Cherries, the Big Mango, and the Big Lobster (known to locals as Larry). Some represent things you don’t really want to see larger-than-life: witness Big Mosquito.

Clustered mostly in the southeast, Australia’s Big Things have a campy appeal that makes it fun to take a picture next to one or two. But before you join the trend of people scheduling road trips to see all 150, be sure to evaluate your priorities: to visit every Big Thing, you’d have to drive the circumference of Australia.

Paulscf/Wikipedia Commons

Chapter 69

The Path of an Advancing Column of Driver Ants

If you don’t relish the idea of spending your vacation being attacked by flesh-eating insects, you should stay clear of driver ants. Native to the African rain forest, they protect themselves by plunging their giant, razor-sharp jaws into anything that stands in their way. Get pinched by one driver ant and you’ll have two irritating puncture wounds; get pinched by a colony and your African safari will come to a quick and gruesome end.

Luckily, driver ants travel in groups of up to twenty million, which makes them pretty easy to avoid. “Viewed from afar, a huge raiding column of a driver ant colony seems like a single living entity, a giant amoeba spreading across 70 meters of ground,” says Bert Hölldobler, an expert on the species. The ants also prefer the taste of insects to human flesh and, thanks to their tendency to eat anything in front of them, are excellent for pest control—provided that you’re not home at the time of their visit. If you are home and are for some reason immobilized, however, you could be eaten alive.

In the unlikely case that that happens, here are some interesting facts to distract you from the searing pain: driver ants are blind, so they communicate through pheromones. Fertile males are driven out of the colony when they’re young and spend their pubescent weeks developing into gross-looking winged insects whose bloated abdomens give them their even grosser nickname: “sausage flies.” Once a sausage fly reaches sexual maturity, he sniffs out a nearby driver ant column and then plops himself down in its path. The other ants swarm on top of him and, as if punishing a philandering husband, rip off his wings. Once he’s been suitably incapacitated, the ants carry the sausage fly off to a virgin queen, who nabs a lifetime’s worth of sperm, and then leaves him to die.

I would also not recommend seeing a column of driver ants from the perspective of a sausage fly.

Chapter 70

The Road of Death

I try to avoid traveling on any road that requires a prayer ceremony, which means that I’m probably never going to drive the North Yungas Road in Bolivia. Running only about forty miles from Coroico in the Amazon rain forest to La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, its unofficial nickname is El Camino de la Muerte—the Road of Death.

Its official nickname is no more reassuring: in 1995, the Inter-American Development Bank declared Yungas the World’s Most Dangerous Road. It’s been known to kill between two hundred and three hundred people a year; during one particularly bad stretch, twenty-five vehicles went over the edge in one twelve-month period—an average of about one every two weeks. The road is so dreaded that locals stop to present an offering to the goddess Pachamama—Bolivian for “Mother Earth”—before they drive it. Pachamama apparently enjoys beer; unfortunately, so do many Yungas drivers.

Look at a photograph of the road and it’s obvious why death is a concern. Despite being used for two-way traffic,