iStockphoto / Scott Phares
Few creatures elicit an innate response from humans as powerful as spiders do. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, will wake you up in the morning as fast as walking down a fresh trail in the woods when suddenly you walk face-first into a dewy spider web and start running through the woods flailing your limbs like a Wacky Waving Inflatable Tube Guy while trying to rip off any shreds of the spider’s web… As the saying goes, spiders truly do ‘live rent free’ in our heads.
Now that we’re all on the same page, it’s easy to see why this viral video is going to kill the tourism industry in Bali. Grace Kelly of ‘Grace’s Adventures’ shared a video of massive spiders in Bali literally swarming the island with their enormous spider webs.
Her video has been seen over 20 million times on TikTok and over half a million times on Instagram. On TikTok, she wrote “welcome to hell on earth” but went on to add a disclaimer that this shouldn’t turn people off from visiting Bali because this swarm of spiders is allegedly not very common. She also added that these spiders were found in an area of Bali that isn’t very popular.
I have an idea, let’s watch it again and decide if we should heed her advice:
(Extreme Randy Jackson voice) Yeaaaaaah, that’s a hard ‘no’ from me, dawg.
I’ve caught tarantulas with biologists in the the rain forests of Costa Rica and Panama. I’d say I have a much higher tolerance for spiders than the average joe, but that’s entirely irrelevant in the case of these Bali spiders. This is simply a situation that was created from the stuff of nightmares. Period, point, blank.
For the curious, this was filmed near the Kintamani border while Grace Kelly was traveling between Ubud and Mount Batur. She told news.com.au “I glimpsed at it as we drove past and gasped and asked the driver to turn around because I couldn’t believe what I’d seen.”
Kelly added “I’m absolutely terrified of spiders but I think the awe took over and I knew I wanted to capture it as it was so out of this world. Also, they were very still which made me less uneasy. I didn’t get too close.”
It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be looking for reasons to *not* visit Bali but if they are, these Bali spiders are certainly the reason they’ve been looking.