Snakes Alive!

Anyone who knows me really well will know of my extreme snake phobia and some have witnessed it first hand; most recently my nieces Polly and Charlie when they gave me a “trick present” for Christmas last year – a rubber version from the $2 shop - or my IMG work colleagues at the Singapore night zoo.  

My phobia is thriving here in Cambodia where the worms are the size of small snakes, where it’s not uncommon to see a snake slithering across a road (in “suburbia”), a local giving one a good whack against a fence, clearly dreaming of her family feast that night or little children ‘wearing’ them as a fashion accessory!   Out at the floating villages, a friend of mine, Carol, saw a woman force-feeding a small-ish python the other morning, obviously trying to fatten it up to get more meat for her starving family. 

In Cambodia, there are more amputations of limbs as a result of non-treatment of snake bites that there are from landmines.  Many of the poor opt to visit a local medicine man than to go to a hospital where they will be charged $4.  Recently one man rocked up at New Hope’s Clinic with a completely black (effectively dead) arm, the result of a particularly nasty bite.  He had to be taken to hospital to have it amputated. 

The best type of snake in my opinion is a dead one.  Many of my more adventurous volunteer friends have dared to try them at local markets and to my horror, New Hope serves it up as an entrée to its Tour groups, alongside crickets and salted peanuts!  (The horror part of this is actually the smell of it cooking in the afternoon which sends me flying from the office I work in!).