Green Mamba Mama

Paradise, eh?

Just when you think it can’t get any better than this, sitting in a sarong on the deck at your beach bungalow, sipping a cold soda and looking out over the beach at your feet to the sandy blue waves at the shore, you hear a thud on the planks of the deck and look down, a mere two feet past your own bare toes to the three-foot-long green mamba that has just dropped out of the breezy palm leaves above your head to rest in a perfectly graceful squiggle on the weather-beaten boards. As you jump up into your seat, the skinny leaf-green death rope nonchalantly moseys across the sand to climb the nearest palm, under which another relaxed traveler is lounging in a hammock.

That wasn’t in the brochure… Now, where did I put my machete?