19. Ao Nang

Today, we had a choice either of going to see Muay Thai (the thai version of boxing, it's brutal) or going to visit a well known, local snake rescue shelter. We decided to go and see the snakes, snakes are so common in Thailand, and we haven't managed to see one yet. They even have king Cobras over here.
The snake shelter was a ten min walk away, it was very hot so we took our time.
We were firstly shown around the smaller ( but no less deadly) snakes, which included : vipers, pythons and rainbow snakes. The lady showing us around had a very dark sense of humour and found it very funny trying to scare us with her stories. The lady let us hold a Burmese python and a rainbow snake. The python was very placid and wasn't too scary, but the rainbow snake was very erratic. The lady decided to try and put the snake in James' shorts, much to everyone's amusement. Luckily the snake went inside James' pockets instead 😂. It was quite scary as the snake kept opening its mouth wide and staring at us. Everyone was quite anxious , but the guide found it hilarious.
We moved onto the much bigger snakes then, one cage was full of king cobra pythons and the other cage homed a few huge reticulated pythons. The king cobra's venom can kill you within 30 minutes of being bitten and the reticulated python can eat humans with ease. Pretty scary stuff. After knowing this, we then went inside the cage of the reticulated python, which was pretty cool but slightly unnerving.
Finally, we watched a snake show - which was just crazy. The control and guts of the handlers was madness. The mic controller had lost a finger from a bite so very real danger. They had some Black Cobras, a large reticulated python, 3 rat snakes and a King Cobra. They gave opportunities for photos and to get up close with some of the less dangerous species. It was scary but so fun!
One of the men in the show was really nice and gave us a lift in his tuc tuc to the beach close to our hotel. We sat on the beach for a while and then decided to head back to our room to get fresh before heading to the local night market. James managed to find a genuine fake patagonia t shirt at this market, so he was chuffed. We also tried some bbq crocodile, which was okay, actually. It was very similar to pork.
We headed back to our room and packed ready for our early start and transfer day tomorrow.Meer informatie