Black mamba attack

Okay, I admit the title of this post may be slightly exaggerated in order to get people to read it, but it was pretty close..

The one animal that I had not seen on my trip to this point was a snake. I had heard stories of other people seeing them, but I had never actually laid eyes on one myself. Not that I was hoping to - far from it. And as phobias go, I think it's a fairly healthy one to have.

The location of the near "attack" was the campsite at Aus, our next destination after the Fish River Canyon. The campsite was reminiscent of the Wild West in terms of the tumble-weed type grasses all around and the style of the accommodation. The campsite was within a 10,000-hectare ranch which had a number of hiking trails running through it. On our first night we took the Sunset trail, which was a short route that supposedly gave a great view of the sun setting. We left for our walk a little too early and ended up sitting on a rock for 20 minutes or so waiting for the sun to go down. We also missed the track to the viewing point and so didn't actually see too much of the sunset, but the warm golden light cast on the rocks all around made up for it all the same.

Our campsite

A wild dog in her tent



As we returned to the campsite, we passed a tree with a huge nest in it that looked just like a hay-stack. It was the handiwork of the Sociable Weaver, a small bird that likes to build a large communal nest that can house over 100 pairs of birds. These are the largest nests built by any bird and consist of an elaborate series of chambers. The view from the bottom of the nest is quite incredible, revealing the beautiful structure that the messy side view does not.

The Sociable Weavers' nest

The nest from the bottom

It was on our second night at the camp that we took another stroll around and returned to the same tree. I was about to walk straight under the nest and look up into it, when one of my fellow campers noticed there was a snake hanging out of the nest and called out just in time to stop me in my tracks. The snake had gone up there in search of eggs to eat. After retreating to a safe distance, we stood there for a while watching it. It took what we interpreted as an aggressive posture, raising its head to face us and attack if we approached any closer. We don't entirely know what type of snake it was, but on the basis that it was black and ready to attack, I put my money on it being a black mamba.

I had visions of me being seconds away from re-enacting the scene from Kill Bill Volume 2, where Daryl Hannah's character hands the case of money over to the cowboy in the caravan. He is in the middle of taking the money out, when the black mamba hidden underneath the pile of bank notes, rises up and bites him right in the face.

Since returning home, I have poured over photos of snakes on the internet to try and identify my would-be attacker and came down to a shortlist of a spitting cobra or a cape cobra. as its head appears to be slightly wider in the second photo below. But if there are any snake experts out there and can tell me what it is, I would be interested to know..

Black mamba??