Okay, for what it’s worth I’m going to share something I once saw with y’all.
Maybe 15 yrs ago I was travelling through SE Asia, I was in Indonesia, Java to be specific, in a city called Yogjakarta. A really lovely city, one of the few remaining sultanates, for centuries a centre for arts and culture. Still today a centre for arts and crafts. The city is filled with many wonderous things to enchant a visitor, ancient water gardens, sultan’s palaces, bird markets, and temples in abundance.
We so enjoyed our stay there, anyhoo, we’d become fast friends with a baycek driver (sort of bicycle driven transport, both charming and risky) who took us, day after day from spot to spot to see the wonders of his lovely city. We ended up staying on and the day came when we’d been to all the high spots and we were clearly running out of choices. Our driver, Muday, suggestion a museum not listed in the guidebooks.
Well, of course, we were all over this idea. In no time we were standing outside a dilapidated colonial monstrosity of a building crawling with school children mostly lower form students, all in uniform and pretty much running wildly about all of the few rooms that made up the collection.
And the collection itself consisted of mostly specimens of all manner of bugs and creatures preserved in mason jars, fetus’s of animals with deformities, bones and skeletons and the skins of yet more strange creatures. Snakes, jungle cats and bad taxidermy as far as the eye could see. All of it a jumble, most not labelled.
I’ve been in a lot of museums, but I’ll never forget this one. The collection was absolutely captivating in it’s oddness, and the masses of noisy school children running about in the wide aisles were just as entertaining. We were actually there for quite some time.
Anyhoo, amongst the collection was some old photos and documents with little or no attribution. And there was a series of old photos and accompanying cuttings from newspapers, and the three photos were of a python, a massive python.
It had a very large bulge in it’s belly in the first photo, and second showed it cut open and the body of a (granted both small and slight) Indonesian young man. He was dead.
He had been swallowed by the snake. They had found the snake (who could, no doubt, hardly move), sliced it open and there was the person that had gone missing from the local village. However, it was never determined if he had died from a fall and then the snake came upon the body.
Of course, I cannot produce these photos for you, so sorry. I can only tell you what I saw and in what circumstances. Hoping you enjoyed this journey down memory lane as much as I did.
As for the tv show, I saw it and, I think, if you go back and look again,you’ll see she was crushed by the snake, drawn to her by the heat of her sunburn, it (y’know, supposedly) snuggles up around her, crushes her, then attempts, unsuccessfully, to consume her.
Which explained why she was covered with bite marks and covered in slime.