I have pretty much written off Australia for the same reason - a friend of mine married an Australian, and on her first trip there with him a ginormous huntsman spider crawled out of one of the vents in the car while they were driving. It crawled right back in and couldn't be found so she made her husband stop and buy bug spray so she could sit and aim it at the vent for the rest of the drive. Honestly, if that were me, I probably would have launched myself out of the moving car. She also said that the spiders there are big enough that they sometimes set off the motion detector on her in laws' security system.