Grasshopper Night

Today was the day that we really knew the grasshoppers were back. We'd seen flurries of them in the past few days -- and flurries of people filling their sacks with them -- but this morning, when we rounded the bend onto the main road, close to a hundred people were milling around the edge of the road, selling their sacks of collected bugs and buying from the seated sellers who lorded over ENORMOUS, like impossibly enormous, sacks of grasshoppers. The jumpy bugs coated the sides of buildings, flitted through the air like little green fairies, and exploded out of shaken bushes. They were everywhere. Again!

But tonight was the night we fully grasped the plague-like proportions of this visitation. Coming home from dinner we looked ahead down the road, to the same spot we had seen the hordes of bug-buyers and sellers this morning, and saw something impossible. Floodlights illuminated the sky above the cluster of shops but the light was moving -- an undulating upside-down tornado of moving light. It was the grasshoppers, gathered in such jaw-dropping numbers that we had to take a closer look. Nobody else seemed to pay much attention on the otherwise pitch-black road, but our eyes were fixed on the swarm, and all we could say was "Oh. My. God." over and over again.

The pictures won't totally capture it, but trust us when we say that this put the fear of an Old Testament god into us.