Semi-Close Encounters With Snakes

The simple known fact is that snakes are dangerous, but moreover I knew two persons, one of them was my aunt, who could not bring themselves to even look at snakes’ pictures. My mother told me when her sister was a teenager, she once fell asleep under a vine in the family’s house, and when she felt like someone tickling her she found out it was a snake. She screamed for help and from that day even looking at a photo of snake terrorized her.

In May 2008, I visited a beautiful city on the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula called Salalah. The city is unique in many ways. It is the only spot in the region touched by the Indian monsoon every July and August of the year and that leads to continuous drizzle in that very arid area and makes the temperature dramatically drop to 27 C, where the mercury gets easily stretched beyond 45 C. in the rest of the peninsula. The city becomes lushly green, and the abundant coconut palms give it a Caribbean or Southeast Asian flavor. Besides, it is also one of the cities that claim to have the tomb of the Biblical and Qur'anic figure Job.

In one of the sightseeing tours we visited a natural site of heavy trees and bushes and a waterfall, although the latter was almost dry because the monsoon season hasn't had started yet. I moved away from the group to enjoy a moment of silence, and got closer to big rocks with many cracks that formed beautiful shapes. So close to the rocks that I found out one of the cracks was actually a light brown almost-one-meter long snake. I was startled and immediately stepped back as it moved smoothly back to enter into the crack.

The same day we had a free evening. I preferred to stay at the hotel, work out at the gym and order dinner from room service. The gym was a spacious room on the ground floor overlooking the garden. There were very few persons working out on the cycles. After I warmed up I went for chest workout on the flat bench in a corner of the hall. Weights were placed on the stand and some heavy weights were left on the floor next to jump ropes. When I picked up the dumbbells from the floor, I noticed one of the ropes moved and I thought it was tangled with the weights, but with a closer look I could not believe it was a snake that crawled quickly towards the weights stand.

When I told the trainer, he gave me a doubtful look. Actually I was not even 100% certain of what I saw. To prove I was mistaken he moved all the weights from the stand and there was nothing. He lifted up the stand, and right there we saw a snake in a spiral pose beneath the leg of the stand. It moved quickly to enter a tiny hole in the floor/wall junction.

The whole atmosphere changed and we were ordered immediately to evacuate the room. A snake in a five-star hotel was not an everyday challenge. The feeling that I could have touched it thinking it was a jump rope was repugnant.

The following day when I asked what happened, I felt the management did not want the news to spread in the hotel. They searched the gym and the garden and found nothing, so they just filled up and closed all the holes and cracks.

Two situations involved snakes in the same day for someone who had no close contact with snakes before, and in a city known as a tourist destination but unknown for its wondering snakes was something difficult to forget.

For few weeks later, I would wake up suddenly during the night at the slightest feeling that there was something unusual. It could only be a pillow falling down, a blanket pulled away or a sheet got messed up, but to me it only meant there might have been a snake in my bed.