40 Leeches and a King Cobra!

As a post script to my previous post, I thought I’d share two little events in that happened on our trek…

About half an hour into our walk we reached a spot where Stephen suddenly pulled to a stop in front of us and pointed to a small clearing and explained that this is the infamous spot we’d heard about where he almost ended his days coming face to face with an angry mother King Cobra, and narrowly missed getting bitten by smashing it in the moth with his machete. We were pretty thrilled to be seeing this notorious spot which had perhaps fuelled a great deal of our permanent snake fears during our 2 week confinement in the jungle.

Stephen was just reliving the tale again for our benefit when he suddenly froze mid-sentence. He grabbed the dogs and told us not to make any sudden movements as just to our right, tucked up against a tree was a King Cobra. A fairly small one (we think between 1-1.5m long), but a King Cobra is a King Cobra. Bloody hell did my heart skip a beat (or 5!). This was one of those “is-this-for-real?!!” moments where your brain ricochets back and forth between terror and “thisisoneofthecoolestmomentsofmylife”!

So we back-tracked carefully the way we’d come, hearts pounding. If it’s any indication of how actually nervous we all were, we didn’t even hang around for our usual photo shoot…we retreated to a safe distance before getting a quick zoom lens out to take a vague snap as evidence, then got right back out of there! It was definitely a thrill, and I have to say that Bro and I felt somewhat vindicated for making all of our ridiculous snake-avoiding precautions over the last 2 weeks!

(You can just make him out in the background)

Now anyone who’s been to a rainforest will have heard about leeches, and Borneo is particularly notorious for them. We’d each had the odd leech here and there before, and David had given us a little pre-warning before setting off, but were not prepared for this…After about 10 minutes we stopped trying to pull them off our shoes as we wouldn’t have got more than 5 meters from the house if we continued at that rate, so on David’s advice we tried our best to ignore them until we got back 5 hours later…so it was with trepidation that we sat down 5 hours later to peel off our socks and survey the damage. All I’m going to say is that between us we counted over 40 (yes, that’s FORTY!!) leeches…and my favourite part?!!...Brodie had one on his manhood!! Never have I seen more horror in one man’s face!! (No picture of that one…I’ll keep that one for myself!) ;)

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