Crikey! Steve Irwin I am not

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This was published 12 years ago

Crikey! Steve Irwin I am not

Leave the dangerous critters to the experts ... Steve Irwin.

Leave the dangerous critters to the experts ... Steve Irwin.

I used to love Steve Irwin, I really did. He had this childish enthusiasm that you couldn't shake. I would have gone along with anything he liked. He managed to get people to love crocodiles; if he'd been spruiking cardboard boxes I probably would have become passionate about them as well.

Still, I always had the feeling he was living on borrowed time. Deadly animals are like illegal fireworks, or your parents' alcohol cabinet: if you mess with them enough times something is bound to go wrong. And, famously and sadly, it did.

Irwin's fatal stingray encounter reinforced my strong feeling that animals should be left well alone. Mad TV presenters can run around taunting them all they like but I'll keep my distance, thanks. Crocodiles frighten me; so do snakes and spiders (or anything with more than four legs).

So that should explain my scream - maybe not excuse it but at least explain it.

We were deep in the Thai jungle, somewhere north of Khao Lak, about three hours from civilisation. My group was doing an "extreme hike", which I'd taken to mean a normal hike that just went a bit longer than usual.

It was organised by a fancy resort called the Sarojin, whose idea of extreme, I thought, might be a particularly spicy canape.

As it turned out, we were trekking up a river, clambering across rocks on its banks or wading through the current when necessary.

It was hot; stinking hot. I'd lost track of whether my shirt was soaked through with sweat or drenched from a fall in the river.

My feet were giving off a moist squelch with every step; my long pants, there for leech protection and frankly doing a woeful job, were drenched and must have weighed about 10 kilos, making rock clambering all the more extreme.

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It wasn't quite hiking, and it wasn't quite canyoning. We were spending a fair amount of time in the water, so you couldn't call it a normal walk. It was just a wet slop and clamber through dense Thai forest.

There was dissension in the ranks. Not everyone was happy with the state of things. There was the worry about leeches, of course, but there was also the inadequacy of our hiking gear for this sort of adventure. But hey, we signed up for extreme, and it was extreme we were getting.

Justin, a South African working as a guide, glanced at Jack, his Thai counterpart. "Hey Jack, that big pool where we can stop, it's just up there, uh?"

Jack shook his head. "No, long way."

We groaned and kept trudging and clambering, squelching and rustling. One hiker flicked a leech off his arm as it attempted to burrow in; I slipped and wedged my ankle between two rocks.

Finally, we rounded a bend in the river, struggled over a couple more rocks and there was Justin's pool, which was really just a slight widening of the river with a waterfall at one end. "Best to swim through this," Justin said, squelching out into the pool. "You can climb out near the waterfall."

So we did as we were told, a fellow hiker and I leading the way, wading in until we were chest deep in the murky brown river, then switching to a dog paddle and making for the waterfall.

The pool narrowed at this point, barrelling us with water as we paddled towards rocky safety.

Suddenly, there was a scream. A strangled cry of pure terror. It was loud, because it came from me.

Dead ahead, about a metre away from my semi-submerged face, was the kind of sight you never want to see: a king cobra, its scales glistening with water, its forked tongue darting out of its mouth, its diamond-shaped head about the size of my fist, had reared up in the water, staring down at us in fear and anger.

It took a while to process. The hooded neck, the striped belly, the beady eyes. If it wanted to strike, bam, there was only one thing to hit: I'd be defending myself with my face. So I did what any bumbling city slicker would do - I panicked and screamed.

I made like Ian Thorpe and paddled backwards at light speed, keeping an eye on the cobra, adrenalin firing through my veins as I motored past the other hikers in a blur of flailing arms and legs.

I set a 50-metre freestyle record before shimmying up a rock to safety.

Justin, as ever, was unrattled. "That was a big one, eh Jack?" he called out, still standing in the river. Jack nodded and grinned. I just shook from the adrenalin come-down.

Dangerous animals? Extreme encounters? They sound amazing until you have one. I'd rather leave it to the professionals.

Ever had an encounter with a dangerous animal? Share your story by posting a comment below.

Read Ben Groundwater's column on Sundays in the Sun-Herald.

bengroundwater@gmail.com

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