By the time I got to my third camp on that safari trip, I thought I was prepared for seeing the animals in camp. In fact, at the previous camp, we had the unbelievable experience of having a leopard on the camp walkway near our room (watch for that upcoming post!), and we watched it stalk an antelope that was just too far away to catch. But I didn’t quite react totally appropriately when I had another close encounter.
Upon arriving at camp, we had a few minutes to relax before eating (did we ever stop eating?!) and heading out on our afternoon drive. So, as I always did, I roamed the camp to take photos and document the location and get a lay of the land. When a fellow guest and I got to the pool area, we stopped dead in our tracks. It looked like there was a large bird standing on the wood planks a few feet away from the edge of the pool. It was so still...did it notice us? Was it watching us? Could it bite us? It was standing so still that it was almost spooky how it could maintain that posture.
Well, it didn't move because it wasn't real. It was a bronze statue of a 2 1/2-foot-tall bird. The other guest and I shared a good laugh at that one! We hadn't been scared of lions, hippos, elephants, leopards, or any of the other wildlife we saw up close, but that bronze statue of a bird had had us shaking in our boots!
And then we noticed that there WAS a real, living animal with us at the pool area. A long, thin, green snake was laying on a wooden trunk that served as some nice decoration at the pool area. We both got up pretty close to the snake, since it seemed to be posing for us. It was a rare opportunity for us to take close-up shots of the snake which seemed so timid and harmless. Then it started to slowly move and we got great shots of the entire length of its thin body as it slivered across the pool area to a pool chair.
When we got back to the bar area (did we also ever stop drinking?!), I showed our safari guide some of the photos and asked if he knew what kind of snake it was. He said he certainly did...it was a boomslang, which he said was a terribly dangerous and poisonous snake that would likely not kill us but could cause severe internal bleeding. The other guest and I were NOT happy to hear that, and our guide was shocked that we had seen it at the pool area (and probably also shocked that she and I had been so brave—and also naive—around it).
This story isn't meant to scare people away. We weren't scared. And the camps are immensely prepared for this sort of thing. This experience showed me that you never know what you're going to come across, and you should be prepared for anything—not just with your camera but with your curiosity to ask questions about what you see.
Maybe I tell this story to explain that I came face-to-face with a poisonous snake in the wilderness of Africa and lived to tell the tale. And so can you. And every time I tell the story and show people the photos, I feel a little pride at my bravery (and at my slight stupidity).
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