The day I almost died

Once upon a time in a land far, far away (well a 2 hour drive at least) this little cave-mama decided to visit her rightful home. She had a wonderful little adventure, she danced with the devil, she freaked out and then she took her story up a notch by suggesting she almost died. The true story goes like this…

We took our team on a ‘team building’ day seeing as we hadn’t spent much time together as a group since we had 2 newbies join the team. We told them to meet us at the practice (work) at 7:30am and that they would be returned by 5pm. We didn’t tell them much else other than that they needed to dress in full-cover clothing like overalls and that they would need a funnel and bottle to pee in. That was a fun conversation!

We drove 2 hours north-ish and came to a paddock, we pulled over and got our equipment organised, walked to the edge of a cliff, climbed down about 40 metres, walked along the river bank and came to an opening. We were going caving.

With our head lights on and our last private wee’s completed we ventured into the dark. After the first corner there was nothing. No light. No rubbish. No animals. No noise. No water. Just the 7 of us.

We chatted, we crawled, we wormed, we walked, we ducked, we sweated, we took photos, we laughed, we thought, we stopped, we kept going, we explored.

About 1km in, we came to a bore pipe that had been drilled down from one of the farm houses about 40 metres above us. We started mucking around. We were having fun.

About 4 photos later, one of us spotted the snake. Like I said, it was dark in there other than our headlights. We all laughed, thinking he was joking. Our guide said he had never seen a snake down there, in fact he had never seen any sort of life down there.

“No really, there’s a snake!”
And he was pretty angry that we had disturbed him.

We freaked out and backed off. Wow! We were just standing at that exact spot! All a little shaken, we took a different path and left the snake alone. After many discussions, we decided he had probably just come out of his hole after he heard all the commotion. We would have seen him beforehand otherwise. We also decided that had anyone been bitten, trying to keep them still and carrying them a kilometer back to the cave entrance then 40 metres up the cliff, then 30-60 minutes to the nearest hospital were not great odds for survival.

There were more adventures to be had though! We found this beautiful, quiet, hidden pool of water. We stripped off and took a dip. It was relaxing after the events that had just occurred. We decided not to go back towards where the snake was so we cut our caving trip short and made our way back to the entrance and back to the cars. Exhausted, excited and hungry, we got some lunch, debriefed and headed home.

That night we got a call from the guide that took us caving. He had downloaded the photos and upon closer inspection he had found that the snake was actually in the photos. But only in the one I was in! I freaked. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in that sort of situation, but I actually found the thought of the snake being there without me knowing far more creepy than seeing it at the time. I don’t know how that works! But I didn’t sleep to well that night. All the ‘what if….’ scenarios went through my head.

I relaxed and thought myself lucky. It must have just gotten there when they took my photo and I got away before the snake worked out what was going on. I was glad I was wearing hiking boots anyway! Everyone else had old sneakers on.

The next day, the photo was emailed to us. I freaked out some more! Here is the same photo from above but I have zoomed it in:

Not only was it in the photo… I was freaking-well standing on it and it was wrapped around my foot!! Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! Shiver….

No wonder the poor snake was angry!

I still shudder a little when I think of it. It was a bit creepy. I feel lucky too though. And I feel sorry for the snake. And I’m not going caving again any time soon!

What’s your near death story?

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Pitter Patter Chatter’s snake story! - Yes she too had a snake encounter the same week that I did!

This post was submitted for The Digital Parents March Blogging Carnival – Pop on over and check out a few of the other posts there!