Alli and Brian's Archipelago Adventure: snakes

Lately I’ve been moseying about the jungle at night by myself. I’ve finally gotten comfortable enough to just wander off and see what nocturnal goodies I can scope out. Luckily Juara is situated next to some draw-dropping secondary and primary rainforest, with three purdy rivers cutting into the jungle around the village too.

A popular waterfall trek that tourists and school groups alike fancy during the day is all mine at night. And two of those rivers are ripe for nighttime exploration, whether on foot in my scuba booties or in a kayak.

My solo endeavors have reaped a bountiful list of jungle residents. On the mammal scene there’s been Mouse Deer, the Common Palm Civet and numerous Red Spiny rats, all firsts for me.

I spotted this Common Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphrodites) looking down on me while trekking up to the local waterfall at night.

The herps have been more than rewarding. I’ve seen one Blue Bronzeback snake and a few Reticulated Pythons. The frogs have been noisy, calling about everywhere, including the White-lipped frog, Poisonous Rock frog, Blyth’s Giant frog; fat, warty, loud River toads; and an impeccably bloated Banded Bullfrog on a ride home one night. Plus another endemic lizard species, being a spaz on rocks: the Pulau Tioman Bent-toed gecko.

The Pulau Tioman Bent-toed Gecko (Crytodactylus tiomanensis) posing quite nicely.

But none of these creatures compare to what I stumbled across about one week ago. The time was nearing 11pm and I had decided to turn around and head back down the river, toward my motorbike. The night wasn’t phenomenal, just three frog species, but it wasn’t a total bust either.

As I combed the left side on my walk back I noticed a long stretch of tan color that looked too light to be a tree root. This possible tree root stretched from down in the water, to up along the top of the stream bank. My headlamp could have used some extra battery juice so I couldn’t make out exactly what I was looking at. I quietly popped up onto a rock in the river, lit up the tan object and realized I was standing within one meter of a King Cobra.

The long-as-can-be King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) where it was found in-situ. Notice the the lower half of the snake heading right out of the tree trunk, up the bank.

I got goose bumps, stared mouth agape, hollered a few excitable expletives and then moved back onto a much larger boulder in the river, to verify I was definitely looking at the mack daddy of all cobras (Ophiophagus hannah). I was. As far as snakes go on Tioman they’re pretty unmistakable. The size, head and its scales, upper body and color all screamed cobra.

That night I pegged the length of the serpent at 3-4M (~10-13ft). Yeah, this specimen was a biggie. Longest snake I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. The head and upper body were in the water, with the rest of it meandering up through the base of a robust tree trunk, turning ninety degrees and then unraveling along the dirt bank.

The rock I popped up onto to get a closer than needed view when I first spotted the cobra.

Unfortunately it had another characteristic that made this discovery a little grim. The King Cobra was a goner. Dead as can be. This was verified the next morning when I returned to the sighting area with Adam, a friend/colleague of mine.

Playing with the cobra the next morning, ya know, taking measurements and having a photo shoot.

The night before I noticed it hadn’t moved much. Since it was late, I was by myself and I had never found a King Cobra before I decided to not mess with it, e.g. throwing rocks and sticks at it to see if the snake still had a pulse. That’s exactly what we did in the morning. No reaction. The night before it’s head was partially submerged in the water, but right at the surface and alert. Now it was facing down, as if it had been placed in time out, and looking the part of dead.

Plank vs. Cobra. Snake wins length battle easily! Adam is around 1.8M (6ft) tall.

We decided to get the cobra out of its current position and move it over to the rocky shore across the river. That’s how I know the first King Cobra I ever found ended up clocking in at 3.8M (12.47ft). Frickin’ awesome. This species has been known to grow as long as 6M (almost 20ft). Sadly, the snake had just recently shed too; hence the eye-catching tan color, the same shade of a fulfilling afternoon cup of tea with lots of sweet milk thrown in.

So we splayed the snake out and wondered how the hell it ended up dead. The tail had been gnawed on pretty well, with a few chunks missing, but the rest of the body was intact. The upper body and neck area, running up to its snout, were the only parts to not go through the shed. The old skin was still clinging to scales. We opened its mouth and peered inside, which was big enough to consume my fist or a plump grapefruit. Or both.

Open wide! A fist or two could easily get lost in there.

Obviously the fact that the King Cobra was deceased puts a damper on the finding. But there’s more than enough to be ecstatic about. A quick peruse through the herp guide for the Seribuat archipelago (and the scientific paper preceding this book) reveals the only confirmed sighting of this species on Tioman reigns from Kampung ABC, on the west side of the island and a good 8-9km (~5 miles) away from Juara.

Charlie from JTP has told me before he’s seen a cobra in the same river I did. I believe him. Sometimes in this part of the world it’s difficult to know when other people have seen a cobra species or not. Most folks think any snake out here is a cobra or python, just like people in Arizona who always think the snake they just came across had rattles and was ready to strike them in a moment’s notice.

The head just underneath the water when first found. Notice the shed skin still lingering and the massive, plate-like scales on its head.

So yup it’s a bummer it had to be dead. But just knowing that an over 12 ft. long snake was out roaming in the jungle, scarfing down other snakes and eating monitor lizards makes me smile. Our world’s charismatic megafauna (tigers, orangutans, giant pythons and anacondas, crocodiles, wolves, etc.) is vanishing fast. As David Quammen has written, we are at war with wild places and along with that, the creatures that rule them.

Tioman is too small to support your classic big-game jungle animals: rhinos, sun bears, elephants and those aforementioned tigers. But we still got some hefty heavy hitters out there and I’ve seen ‘em: monitor lizards pushing 3M (almost 10ft); huge pythons that can squeeze a mouse deer to death and then have it for dinner; and now 12ft long King cobras on both sides of the island. Looks like Tioman, with its ever-developing coastline and the increasing 3D/2N package tourists that go along with that, is still a wild place after all. What more could you ask for? Well, maybe an alive 15ft cobra. I’d settle for that.

Maneuvering it around so we could measure it.

Tail area, which was the only part of the cobra that showed injury.

Large Water monitor (Varanus salvator). This sickly beast was almost stepped on by Adam while we were trekking to a summit view point in another area in Juara. These are top predators on Tioman. This one is easily over 2M (6.5ft).

Blyth's Giant frog (Limnonectes blythii)

Handsome Blue Bronzeback (Dendralaphis cyanochloris) found in streamside vegetation very close to the cobra sighting.

Sprawled out and chillax-ing.

White-lipped frog (Hylarana labialis)

Large stick insect (Phasmatodea sp.)

Obese-looking Banded Bullfrog (Kaloula pulchra) on my ride home.

Big Boi on the rocks: River toad (Phrynoides aspera).

I've never lived in a house that wasn't connected to a road. In this day and age it seems like such an odd outlier. How many people in America, or even Malaysia for that matter, inhabit a joint that you can't park in front of, whether it's a car, motorcycle or bike? But that's where I find myself typing this blog up: in a wooden jungle house that no road reaches.

The Lady smiling from the kitchen window of our jungle home. *** All photos can enlarged by clicking on them.***

Our latest home is only accessible via a wood pontoon buoyed by plastic jerry cans (once used for transporting petrol) that drops you off at a footpath leading here. Or you can wade across the mangrove mouth at low tide avoiding slippery rocks of slime, swim across if the water's high or take some kind of boat if you don't fancy getting too wet, like a kayak.

Myself maneuvering the pontoon across the lagoon.

We're not that high on the remoteness scale out here though. I can see the pontoon from our porch and can easily hear the motorbikes ridden down to the end of the road where you catch the boat. We're just across a small lagoon from where we're working out of this summer, yup, it's called the Lagoon. We can hear people at the beach sometimes, and next door to us rubber trees are tapped and bushels of tapioca rise upward.

View from the pontoon. Our house is just behind the vegetation in the middle of the photo.

Our home is more vacation locale than a Ted Kaczynski outpost. “Stay at the Rustic Jungle Inn” our promotional material could proclaim. It's set back just enough from the shoreline to blend into the jungle, which surrounds it. The land wasn't cleared and for the most part you can never see the house from shore, except at a few precise vantage points.

Looking back at the lagoon from our porch.

The fact that no road passes by or ends here ratchet-ups its remoteness feel, even if I can be on cement in five minutes. In Juara, and most places Alli and I've been to in Malaysia and Indonesia, if there's a way for a motorbike to get there, it will. Up a steep dirt path to a plot of land enveloped by durian trees, through a nutmeg plantation, or careening through sidewalks skirting gobbling turkeys and front porches en route to a lake's fish-farming baskets, no problem at all.

The end of the road in Juara, on the south end of town. This is where our raft journey to our house begins.

Here in Juara people love their motorbikes and zip around all day long on them, with most houses and establishments lying right along the road, soaking up all the accompanying noise as well. People are constantly stopping to chat or just driving around for kicks. Reminds me of when I was 17 and just got a 1992 Buick Park Avenue. I cruised around constantly, smoking cigs and cranking Jay-Z's classic “Reasonable Doubt” album. I thought I was a lot cooler than I was, but my steer was a boss hog. Gas mileage efficiency? Hell, this was pre-9/11 where a gallon of gas cost the same as a bottle of King Cobra malt liquor.

Laundry day.

But out here where no motorized transportation swings through; privacy actually exists. To get here you have to actually put in a little effort, and will probably have to get your feet or tush wet and/or muddy, receive some jolting ant bites or break a spider's web with your face as you walk along. So that's a deterrent to some. The bonuses of living out here are bulky though: encountering Reticulated pythons (Broghammerus reticulatus) slowly progressing across the forest floor on your way home from dinner; rockin' an outdoor shower; witnessing sea eagles, kites and ravens scrappily tussle over mangrove canopy space; and sipping coffee while rain pummels our roof. Plus no one ever bothers you, just the occasional tourist who's lost the waterfall trail.

Reticulated python (Broghammerus reticulatus) recently spotted above a tree in a Juara river. Unfortunately the photos of the python I spotted on the way home the other day were deleted by my camera, and of course they were the best photos I've gotten of this snake in Asia.

In addition to the remoteness factor, one thing that we are constantly reminded of is how quickly the jungle wants to take back the house. Cleaning the digs up after it experienced the drenching monsoon season all by itself took a few days. The owner, a lady from Germany, uses it a for a few months every year, but the rest of the time it sits, and the jungle around grows. I had to wield a machete for a few hours to clear the trail here, and then we spent the rest of the time making it livable.

Mopping up the floors, which had a nice layer of gecko poop on them.

Geckos are beyond prevalent out here, like feral cats in American cities, except these lizards take shelter in the rafters and rain poop down, in drastic numbers sometimes. The collection of gecko crap inside the house and on the mattress (we got a new one) was by far the most I've seen. The resplendent Kuhl's Gliding Gecko (Ptychozoon kuhli) lays its eggs on vertical surfaces, which outside means tree trunks, but in here it's our walls. The hatchlings pop out, leaving white painted dots the size of M&Ms behind. You'd a thought a vat of brown Tic-Tacs had spilled down from the ceiling. Spiderwebs covered most open areas. A layered chocolate cake mound of ant life shared a wall with our bathroom and kitchen. Yellow larvae (silkworms maybe) swooned around our porch like puppets maneuvered by a wino. We've had a few rats, too.

Kuhl's Gliding Gecko (Ptychozoon kuhli) in our kitchen.

Not the most pleasant creature to wake you up at 3am. That's what happened for awhile. The said rat would mosey around the chocolate cake ant mound into the house, knocking off a few dishes on its way to the ground, in general causing a ruckus. That's when I'd wake up, put on my headlamp and in a sleep stupor actually think my swinging a broom in its general direction was going to finish the rodent. Fat chance. After a few nights my strategy never gained gumption and it was clear my baseball swing was still at tee-ball level. Cue the rat trap and a dangling piece of pseudo-wheat bread. Later on that night I was woken up by Alli, who definitely heard some commotion in the kitchen. And there it was, the hair-less tailed mammal, flailing about in its trap. Success.

The rat that was lured into my pseudo-wheat bread trap.

We had another visitor a week or so later. This one must have smelled the garlic sizzling and marinara bubbling. I first saw it in the yard when I was taking a shower and later on when it zipped into our kitchen only to be chased out by me. Figured it was time to set another trap, which yes, was another success. These guys are quite predictable. But what to do with a live rat? I tried the poison I found in our bathroom, but I think tropical humidity and time had won out. The pellets crumbled like ancient pencil erasers and never worked. Drowning was the next best option and that did 'em in.

The pink poison that didn't do jack.

Because of our distance, and location across a mangrove lagoon, no cats claim this property as home. Almost every house and building in Juara has a few kitties milling about, being lazy in the sun and offing a host of jungle creatures: lizards, bugs, snakes, birds, and of course, rats. Neuter and spay services don't exist here. Just having the felines post up is enough to prevent a visit from these nocturnal nuisances. But bringing a cat over here and starting up a rogue, minuscule rat-killing colony is not the answer.

First trash fire ya heard!

Part of being disconnected: from the road, from the town, from enjoying the perks of non-neutered felines, is to accept the remote-ness. Along with peaceful cups of coffee in the morning and lack of motorized visitation you have to get used to a few pests, and accept that once in awhile your toes will get stung by marauding nighttime ants or your kitchen, with its sweet Milo stash, will draw in a rat.

Every self-respecting jungle house needs a healthy Milo stash.

As a whole, humans the world over have transformed landscapes,slicing jungle or desert here, adding in roads and black-top there. The trade-off with a secluded jungle house is exactly that, you have to accept living in a secluded jungle house. Trying to make it something it's not just doesn't jibe. We have certain staples of modernity here: electricity, running water and a laundry machine to name a few; but obviously other staples don't show face. Plus, without cats around I've had to do a little more dirty work.

Attempting to put in a palm frond shower wall thingie. Sadly it only lasted about 24 hours as a fierce thunderstorm came in, and big bag wolf style, blew it all down.

It was strange killing the two previously-mentioned rats, watching them convulse about in the underwater trap. I'll stamp out mosquitoes and bugs without a thought, but I get all pissy and mad when I hear people talking about killing snakes or lizards. And truth be told if a snake slithered into my abode I'd be ecstatic. It's strange to ruminate on these thoughts while watching a rat struggle for its last breaths. But the fact is if we wanna live here we can't have rodents scurrying wild in our kitchen, trying to nibble on everything from oatmeal to packaged noodles. That would be way too rustic.