Last year, I stayed in Chiang Dao, a small mountain village in Northern Thailand for several days. After returning to my small guesthouse in the countryside after an all day tour, one of the guests came running out of the lobby to announce that there was a poisonous snake on the hotel grounds. Sure enough, there was a snake about 4 feet long slithering across the lawn with a big frog/toad in his mouth. Camera in hand, I was able to take several pictures of this creature, which I later learned was a red keelback snake, a moderately venomous snake, fairly common to the area. As his mouth was preoccupied with disgorging the poor frog, I wasn’t scared of getting bitten.

It is a relatively rare occurence to encounter a snake during your travels, unless you stunble upon a snake’s nest in the boonies. Snakes in general, are vey secretive creatures and they are very afraid of human beings. By all means, do not pick it up, do not step on it and carefully observe it safely from a distance. And please do not molest or harm the snake as he has a right to live too. After all, he lived on this land long before we were around on this planet so please give this slithering serpent some respect.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Commentary, Thailand, nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.