Cornflakes and Pythons

Travel Story by Ian Douglas

Bangkok, Thailand

For once it was not my alarm clock that woke me. Instead the high-pitched shrieks of my wife yanked me from dreamland.

"Come quick, very big snake in the garden!" She screeched in her thick Thai accent. I stumbled sleepily downstairs, cussing to myself.

"How long is it going to be? Two foot? Three foot?" I pondered mockingly. In the kitchen both my wife and the maid were screaming like banshees. Pushing them aside in a brave, manly fashion I peered through the window. Outside on our veranda, lay an equally sleepy twelve-foot python. I began screaming in harmony with the womenfolk.

Perhaps awakened by my own high-pitched shrieks, the monster yawned, uncoiled his massive muscular body, and began to slither around the outside of the house. It was then, with an icy chill, that it struck me- why all my beloved stray cats had vanished! Over time I had befriended the local feline population. They used to queue up every morning on the patio for the Kittikat Crunchies I dished out. Then, one by one, they disappeared, in a kind of ten-little-kitties mystery.

Our house sits on a small weed-choked canal that goes nowhere. During the night there had been a heavy rainfall and the street flooded. Presumably this had prompted the snake to venture out from the canal into our grounds. Perhaps he was looking for a tasty feline tidbit. The problem was, now he was here, how were we going to get rid of him?

We called the police. Meanwhile, Seth, as I had christened the enormous reptile, attempted to squeeze himself through the garden railings that blocked off his escape route to the canal. Unfortunately, he was just too fat. Each time he would get so far before a suspiciously cat-shaped bulge in his stomach lodged firmly between the bars. There was no way out.

Seth was a magnificent Regal Python, famed for their size and aggression. They are in fact the longest snakes in the world with a thirty-three footer having claimed his rightful place in the record books. With two small children in the house, the possibilities petrified me.

The morning passed while we anxiously anticipated the police and snake handler. In true local style they never arrived. At one point there was a call to say they were waiting around the corner. Waiting for what? Presumably for the snake to leave by himself!

Seth sought refuge in a small mango tree overhanging our neighbors' garden. Our neighbors summoned some tuk-tuk drivers, four of them loitering nearby, who gamely fashioned a noose from a washing line and an old prop. In a move that I considered to be somewhat reckless, the tuk-tuk drivers roped Seth around the neck, lasso style. Seth, being stronger than all four of them, resisted and a bizarre tug-of-war culminated with him falling out of the tree, bouncing off the spiky railings, back into the overgrown, murky canal.

The tuk-tuk boys swaggered around the garden beating their chests triumphantly, but it seemed to me that the score was – humanity 0 : Seth 1. Although I did not want to see him killed, I naively hoped that some nice Bangkok zoo would take him in. As it was, Seth had escaped to fight another day.

Thais believe an encounter with a snake, providing you don't harm him, brings you pots of good luck. My wife has been buying up lottery tickets by the bagful since she met Seth. The fact we emerged unscathed is luck enough for me. Call me a python paranoid, but it will be ages before I can take a solitary nap in my back garden. Every time I look down at that tangled mess of a canal, I wonder, is Seth underneath, looking back at me?

Read more about the author of this story:
Ian Douglas