COBRA VILLAGE
Outside of Thailand’s national parks, only in the northeastern province of Khon Kaen are you likely to see road signs that read, ‘Warning: King Cobra Crossing’. It’s a sure sign that you’re on the right track to see the ‘Cobra Village’, where most of the villagers breed and raise snakes for a living. At Ban Kok Sa-nga, they also put on daily shows of derring-do where snake-handlers wrestle with king cobras up to five-metres long.
The majority of the 700 villagers raise snakes, and some even keep them as pets, said Sirisak Noi Lek, the president of the village’s Cobra Conservation Club. “The tradition started back in the 1950s when a man named Ken Yongla from this village began travelling around the countryside selling herbal medicines. To attract more people, he started doing regular shows with cobras, but these snakes were too dangerous because they can spit venom for several metres. So he used king cobras instead. They’re still dangerous, but the venom is delivered through their fangs. Ken trained many of the locals to do the performances and how to raise snakes.”
The chiming of cow bells heralded the arrival of a shepherd directing her charges down the dirt road as Sirisak led us to the back of his house. Curled up in a wooden box was a python as thick as a fire-hose. The locals catch them in their gloved hands when the snakes are sleeping during the day. Every few days, Sirisak feeds the python smaller snakes or a frog. Some of the serpents have their gall bladders removed for Chinese potions—even mixed with whiskey for an aphrodisiac. Others are cast as performers in shows that pit man against serpent.
Far from the sinister figure in the Garden of Eden that encourages Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge (thereby bringing about the downfall of humankind), the seven-headed ‘Lord of the Serpents’ (Phaya Nak) opened his hoods to protect the Buddha from the elements as he attained enlightenment while meditating under the sacred ficus tree. For many Thais, Phaya Nak, whose long body forms the balustrades of many Buddhist temples, is a figure of reverence.
So it’s not a revelation that the monks incubated a special laboratory to breed king cobras in the Buddhist temple near the zoo and the venue for performances. On this afternoon, sitting in the bleachers surrounding the stage, was a group of Buddhist monks draped with orange robes, among a smattering of Thais and tourists. Behind the stage was a gigantic billboard for Pepsi, framed by photos of the King and Queen of Thailand.
To the tape-recorded tune of hand-pummeled drums, the clink, clink, clink of finger cymbals, and an Indian oboe playing melodies serpentine enough to charm a cobra—the same traditional tunes played live during muay thai boxing matches—three dancers took centre-stage. Dressed in pink sarongs, each of the young ladies wore live garlands of sinuous pythons, jaws wired shut with string. Shooting off flashbulb smiles, and moving as gently as palm fronds in a breeze, the dancers’ slow-motion body language spoke volumes about the tranquility of traditional Thai culture, and its nature-borne birthright.
At the back of the stage, a snake-handler used a long metal pole with a hook to pull a writhing king cobra out of a box. Black with silver bands, the three-metre-long serpent slithered towards the front of the stage. In the crowd, spines straightened and a hush descended. The venom of a single king cobra bite is enough to kill a man—or a hundred rodents—unless treated immediately. Many of the snake-wrestlers take herbal concoctions daily to lessen the possibility of fatalities. Just in case, a local medic equipped with anti-venom attends every show.
On his knees, the snake-handler crawled towards the king cobra. The snake reared up into the striking position, its forked tongue flicking the air. (Snakes use their tongues for sniffing out their quarry and their enemies.) Quick as a whip, the king cobra lunged at him. The snake-handler dodged the attack. Distracting the snake with one hand held in the air, he crawled beside it, lowered his head and kissed the cobra on its head.
TORTOISE TOWN
In Asia, few creatures are mythologised like the turtle, partly because of its longevity, and the symbolism of its shell in the Chinese vision of the earth and the cosmos. Turtle soup is enjoyed by many East Asians as an anti-ageing tonic and delicacy, but it’s usually the soft-shelled kind, because the hard-shelled variety have too much spiritual significance.
In Vietnam, the mascot for its many wars of independence is a turtle that still lurks in Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake. To this day, Vietnamese schoolchildren learn the 15th-century legend of a rebel soldier named Le Loi whose troops repelled Chinese invaders. After he became the emperor of a dynasty named after him, Le Loi was boating on the lake when a turtle snatched his sword and dove beneath the waves to protect the weapon for future battles.
Nowadays, there is only one turtle left in the lake, weighing around 200 kilos. The so-called ‘Turtle Professor’, Professor Ha Dinh Duck of Hanoi University, is the foremost expert on the reptile. He claimed the turtle has surfaced some 400 times since the early 1990s, often coinciding with state visits by Chinese presidents and even the unveiling of a Le Loi statue. “It’s something we can’t explain,” the academic told AFP, adding that every appearance of the creature has caused an upsurge in crowds.
The government spent US$2.4 million to clean up the polluted, algae-plagued ‘Lake of the Returned Sword’ for Hanoi’s 1,000th anniversary celebrations in 2010.
At Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok, one of the first sights to greet visitors is a colossal statue of the Hindu creation myth, detailing the seminal ‘Churning of the Milky Ocean’ from which all life arose. Standing atop a sacred tortoise is the deity Vishnu. At Angkor Wat, bas-reliefs depict similar tableaux.
An hour’s drive from the Cobra Village in Khon Kaen province is Mu Bahn Tao, or Turtle Village, a town crawling with tortoises which have also been blessed with a divine lineage. Locals believe these yellow-headed tortoises are protected by the village’s guardian spirit, Chao Khun Pa, the late abbot of a local temple who befriended the creatures. (Consider him a Siamese equivalent of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.) At the entrance to the village are two models of its totemic figure, burnished with gold, draped with garlands and housed in a wooden pavilion. Down the main road is Tortoise Park. Bridges span the park, affording an overview of the creatures trudging around.
The adults of this species (Indotestuda elongata) weigh around three kilos. Their shells, a patchwork of black and yellow, span 30 centimetres. The reptiles’ staple diet is grass and fruit. Some visitors feed them slices of watermelon by hand.
In this hamlet, the 400 residents living in weatherworn houses propped up on stilts with cows underneath them, and fenced in by pickets of bamboo, are outnumbered approximately three to one by tortoises. The prime times for tortoise-spotting are early in the morning and late in the afternoon. They are everywhere then: chewing up the greenery in the fields, crawling down the dirt roads and trudging into houses where they are treated like pets. In a hamlet almost 250 years old, even the dogs do not pester them.
Picking up a tortoise in his front yard, Prasong Sutwiset, a local who runs a home-stay for overnight visitors, said, “The males have flatter stomachs and rounder shells. The females have concave stomachs and a capsule-shaped shell.”
The 48-year-old, who was born in the village, is one of many locals with weird tales to relate about the creatures. “A Taiwanese film crew came here and one of them put his foot on a tortoise. Only a few minutes later all their equipment started malfunctioning. Some Thais and foreigners who stole baby tortoises later brought them back after experiencing ill health. But I guess the strangest case was a Thai tourist who accidentally ran over a tortoise in the village. Later that same day, he got into a serious car accident that almost took his life,” said Prasong.
Are these coincidences? This is the question I put to the former editor of Hyper magazine, Veeraporn Nitiprapha, who said, “You Westerners destroy so much with that word. Everything that cannot be rationally explained you call a ‘coincidence’. Thais don’t believe in coincidences.”
These cold-blooded reptiles warm up during the mating season from June to December, when they are quite literally doing it in the streets, the backyards and the park. Like stags in rut, the males square off in head-to-head duels, butting shells to subdue their rivals. The battle-hardened winner then mounts the female from behind. When copulating, the males make strange croaking sounds. Stoically bearing the brunt of these intrusions, the females are silent.
Until watching this orgy erupting all over town, I had not realised the true significance of the Motorhead song, ‘Love Me Like a Reptile’.
ON THE ROUTE TO EXTINCTION
Bulleting down the highway in a fossil-fueled car, en route to the Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum and national park, we encountered one of the most deadly reptiles in all of Thailand: a police officer, who ran out into the middle of road to flag us down. If it wasn’t for the driver putting a lead foot down on the brake pedal, the cop could’ve ended up like many snakes—road kill—though not the kind that is reincarnated in a pungent curry.
Still wearing his sunglasses and grinning at the Thai lady in the front seat, the policeman (who reeked of alcohol) said the radar trap had red-flagged our vehicle breaking the speed limit. Discretely, she handed over her driver’s license along with 200 baht—the going rate for traffic violations—tucked inside it. He pocketed the money and cheerfully gave us directions to the dinosaur museum. Then he told her, “There aren’t any more radar traps on the way, so drive as fast as you like.” The policeman laughed and wished us good luck.
Along the way we spotted many life-size models of dinosaurs, in front of hospitals, beside banks, hovering above traffic islands. These statues are primers for the museum and the park, advertisements for the province’s main draws.
The centrepiece of the Phu Wiang Dinosaur Museum is the metal skeleton of a Siamotyrannus isanensis. Unearthed in 1976, this 15-metre-long monster was the first of its genus and species to be discovered. It’s a forebear of the much bigger Tyrannosaurus Rex. Off to one side of the museum is a kind of Jurassic Park, filled with built-to-scale dinosaurs baring sabre-sized teeth, amid jungles of foliage.
As the museum illustrates, this area was Thailand’s stomping ground for dinosaurs. Other species, like the Phuwiangosuarus sirinhornae (named after Princess Chakri Sirindhorn) and the Siamosaurus suteehorni, were also first discovered in the region. Over in the nearby national park, visitors can get down to the bones of these discoveries and see the pits where paleontologists unearthed them, as well as dinosaur footprints, a 9th-century Buddha image carved into the cliff buttressing Phu Wiang Mountain, and caves with Stone Age artworks.
Many children come to the museum on field trips. Their enthusiasm brightens the gloomiest of days. Running around screaming or sitting on the wooden walkways of the jungle to sketch pictures, the kids are loud testaments to the creatures’ primeval pull.
While the boys gravitate towards the monsters, the girls orbit around the cuter creatures, like a massive tortoise in a glass case. Many sea turtles and land tortoises—of which some 28 different species are found in Thailand—date from 200 million years before the first season of Survivor was shot in southern Thailand. A display in the museum calls this the ‘Age of Mammals’. From that epoch also came the distant ancestors of elephants, dolphins, rabbits and snakes.
In the midst of global warming, rising seas, and the second greatest mass extinction of species the world has ever seen, the museum invites comparisons to the natural calamities that killed off the dinosaurs. It would be ironic if, from the fallout of an environmental apocalypse, what crawled out of the wasteland in 2500 AD were not human survivors, but tortoises, serpents and lizards with the DNA of dinosaurs—prehistory coming full circle and the reptilian brain outsmarting Darwin’s descendants.
For the museum bears little evidence of humankind except for one drawing on the wall showing a portrait of evolution: from the naked homo erectus to the Neanderthal carrying a club and swaddled in animal hides to a pale-skinned woman in a mini-skirt at the end of the line. Compared to the dinosaurs that survived for tens of millions of years and the reptiles which still thrive, the homo sapien looks frail by comparison—the human race but a flash in a primeval reptile’s eye.