Deadly Viper Assasination Squad

Writing this Sunday afternoon in the language school common room. First day of class tomorrow.

Anyway, If you've seen Kill Bill you may remember Uma Thurman's assasin code name was 'Black Mamba'. As another character in that movie noted of the black mamba's bite; 'The amount of venom that can be delivered from a single bite can be gargantuan.' Without anti-venom, a Black Mamba bite is 100% fatal, usually within 20 minutes.

So anyway being bored late at night Francoise and I decided to go for a monster frog hunt around our house. Don't ask. Our security guard looked on at us dubiously as we fossicked around a pile of construction material out the back. Despite hearing some weird shuffling noises, no frogs. So dejected we went back inside. Quarter of an hour later we hear excited voices calling us to come outside. Our guard and his mate had killed with sticks what they said was a 'black mamba' snake. They said that it had come slithering out of the pile of stuff we were loitering around earlier.

Ulp..I asked them several times if it was in fact the deadly black mamba, they were adamant...so contritely we undertook to do no more late night frog hunts.


As a postscript, in the morning we told our Masaai Volunteering contact, showed him the photo and he was dubious. He was sure it was just a common grass snake and that locals get too hysterial about snakes.



That said, the photos on the net I've looked at of the grass/house snake look nothing like the one we found...it looks a lot more like a small-ish Black Mamba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_mamba

hmmm

All snakes bad.


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