Open Writing

I smell a rat as our taxi whips past a large new complex with ‘Snake Show’ on a neon sign above the door. A few minutes later we stop outside a bamboo stockade above which a sign proclaims, rather optimistically, ‘Snake World’. Our driver entrusts us – my parents, wife, son and I – to the care of an androgynous snake keeper. We pay and the driver narrows his eyes, totting up his cut.

Our guide ushers us through a gate, closing it behind us. Inside the compound are a series of rough buildings and chicken-wire cages with a listing plywood amphitheatre at the heart. Two or three staff are scattered around in states of semi-occupation. But I see that we are the only visitors to this reptile Carny.

Sidling towards the first cage I recall an enclosure at Sydney zoo boasting that it held ‘seven of the nine most venomous land snakes on earth’. A close examination of the bushes, grass and logs revealed no life at all, legged or otherwise. Where were these masters of disguise hiding? I now suspect, knowing Australians a little better, that this was a cruel joke at my expense – ‘ay Bruce let’s leave the snake garden empty so that none of the Poms will dare go out in the bush. It worked on me anyway.

This cage has life though. On its packed earth floor lies an intricately patterned plump little coral-coloured snake. I start with recognition. ‘That’s a baby Python.’ I say, in an annoying know-it-all tone.

The guide looks at me pityingly and then looks down at the sign on the cage saying ‘Marble Viper’.

I ask the big question, “Is it poisonous?’

‘It bite you maybe you die’. Oh. Okay.

I resolve to never again trust my Thai friend who told me that a snake identical to this one was safe, whilst pulling its tail, a couple of months ago.

We circulate, looking at the contents of each cage. My boy is scared. This is alright. I am scared. You should be scared of things that can kill you.

I approach an open walled pit and look down to see the roiling mass of intertwined serpents that have lurked in my dreams since Indiana Jones. ‘Rat Snakes,’ says the guide in my ear. ‘Not poisonous’, he/she adds, anticipating well.

A member of staff is tapping on the wire of the neighbouring cage. He pulls his hand away just as an infuriated metre-long Rat Snake strikes at it, only to be thwarted by the wire. He taps again and is met with the same furious response. Then he looks at me and gestures at me in a way that says, ‘your turn now’.

So I tap the cage tentatively and a snake whips from the floor and strikes at the cage, giving me the bad eye. This is proving to be an instructive visit. I had previously thought naively that snakes without venom were okay. You live and you learn.

The action is really hotting up now. I can’t help harbouring a suspicion that we are the first people to come here for a very long time, if ever. I am interrupted from alarming thoughts of what goes on here when there are no visitors by our arrival at an enclosure with a waist high wall. It is empty apart from a hollow tree trunk in the centre. The Rat-Snake goader grabs a stick, vaults the wall and jabs it into the trunk like a toothpick probing for gristle.

‘What’s in there?’ I ask, a sense of surreality quelling the creeping dread.

‘Spitting Cobra,’ is, perhaps inevitably, his grinning reply.

‘Er.. Isn’t that a bit dangerous?’

‘No. Is okay. Day time.”

We move on, looking for candid cameras and are shepherded by our guide into the amphitheatre. It consists of a dirt floor surrounded by three rows of bench seats. There are sealed wooden boxes scattered around the floor. We all sit on the third row, expecting the worst. Our guide turns on a P.A. system that is more than adequate for an audience of five and introduces us to the ringmaster who ambles into the ring. He is a strong-looking walnuty man of around sixty with few teeth and no hair. He grins at us in a manner I’m fast coming to distrust. The show begins.

They start with Pythons. A couple of these huge slabs of constrictive muscle are taken from boxes, stretched, coiled, draped upon us for photos and dropped back in their cages, their day's work done.

Then comes the Rat Snake. This really is an angry animal. I guess I would be if I was imprisoned in a dark box with weird Carny people as my gaolers. It shoots across the floor toward the kneeling ringmaster and strikes at where his head had been moments before. It strikes again and draws back uncertainly as its quarry dodges the blow effortlessly. The ringmaster then picks up the snake as casually as if it were an umbrella. He then performs a routine of releasing it, catching it, letting it try to bite his face, shoving it in ours and then, Oh God, putting its head in his mouth.

But at least it isn’t poisonous, we think. The ringmaster reads this thought and eyes us, accepting our challenge. He drops the Rat Snake back in its box and lets the Cobra out. And then he goes through the same routine with a deadly asp. At one point the snake strikes at him and catches him in the crotch of his, thankfully, loose fitting fisherman’s trousers and hangs there for a while. The androgyne informs us excitedly that the ringmaster has only been bitten three or four times. Only?

Then the ringmaster does something strange. He rolls the snake’s body over just a half turn. The snake is hypnotized. It is still awake but placid. He picks it up and it just dangles there dreamily. Then he turns it another half roll and it’s a vicious predator again. Another half-turn and he’s asking me to hold it. As I dangle the Cobra, wishing I had longer arms, it eyes me sleepily and does a couple of turns in the air as if it's rolling over under a duvet.

Show’s over. We thank our hosts for a fascinating visit. We confirm that they’re going to let us leave and then do so. As I head to the gate, from the corner of my eye I see Rat-Snake man suddenly sprint up a slope towards the fence. He reaches to grab something and misses. He reaches again and this time is successful in catching…no, surely not.