A Close Encounter with a Snake in Snake Island

After a 7 hour agonizing trip with Peregrine and a colleague, we finally arrived in Snake island, Pangasinan. As expected, there was absolutely no shade and just some few coconut trees in sight.  It seemed like we just haven’t had enough heat in Manila eh? Yeah it’s kinda crazy to stay here actually, but then unlike most people here in Philippines, we are sun-lovers.  Uhmm maybe not really, this snake island just haunted us in our dreams. We failed to get here before due to the difficulty of reaching this freaking island. So we determinedly pursued this trip to satisfy our curiosity and just to get off the beaten track.

One thing that failed our expectation was that there were some few campers already settled in the island. And yeah, we pretty much thought that we’ll have the island to ourselves, we were that selfish. The funny thing was that we were also scared-shit of being alone in there. Recalling the time when we were inside the jeepney, the locals just bombarded us with warnings and dangers of staying overnight in the island. They were telling us that the weather might change or no one could get out alive there and all that.

I’m actually just scared of one thing – snake. Ok it sounds weird but I’m not worried about something like a Snake island massacre, or be wiped out by storm or locals turned out to be zombies. I was thinking that there must be a reason why this island is called “Snake island”. I’m half expecting a face-to-face meeting with a snake, hoping that I would be able to overcome the fear.

Locals said that in the 1980’s there were lots of sea snakes in this island. For some reason they were wiped away, and it's pretty sad though. Well for sure there are still some snakes in the bushes, but I haven’t seen any . . . until

Tada! Thanks to my colleague who fulfilled my goal. He brought this creature near the shore while I was swimming.

A close encounter with a dead snake, epic fail!

Posted by MissForlorn, Photos by Peregrine