How a surprise treat at The Snake Park at Nairobi Museum helped conquer a lifelong phobia of snakes

The society has slowly transitioned into materialistic, price-tag zombies.

How much is the watch and belt she bought you on your birthday?

The fixation with the price tag is suppressing love, creativity and ingenuity in people. When in need to treat a loved one, ignore your bank balance – just get creative.

What do they like? Or, don’t?

I suffer from extreme OPHIDIOPHOBIA.

Fret not, Sons and Daughters of Adam. That, means the fear of snakes.

I had the misfortune of a day-long treat of close proximity to fearsome snakes, at the Snake Park. This is based at The Nairobi Museum.

What I thought would be a horrid day, opened up my eyes to how naïve, misinformed, prejudiced and generally dumb I was towards these creatures.

We grow up listening to endless myths and tales about snakes. For some reason, snakes take the lead role in stories wading in sorcery, black magic, demons and whatnot. This conditioning from an early age to hate snakes has led to a lot of pointless killing of the creature.

Snakes are usually harmless, except for the odd case.

No? Off-head, tell me of anyone you know who’s been bitten by a snake. No one? Thought so.

These statistics are so low – not because there aren’t snakes where we live. They are low, as snakes deliberately avoid human beings. A bite happens at the extreme end of a probable snake’s biting meter.

For instance, cobras usually slam their bodies up against people instead of biting. It’s a warning, and it works. Vipers, like the Puff Adder, mostly give dry bites. A dry bite is a bite where no venom is injected into the victim.

This is because venom is very hard to make, and takes long. No snake wants to pointlessly waste it on a hysterical human. As a snake, imagine needing venom to immobilize your dinner and not having it – all for biting a human.

Constrictors, like the python are demonized for how they kill their prey. Most people wrongly think their prey suffocates to death. They actually cut off the prey’s blood flow – which knocks out the prey.

That means, the prey doesn’t feel anything.

At the snake park at Nairobi Museum, there’s a large variety of snakes, with detailed descriptions of each. There’s so much to learn about snakes and other misconceived reptiles, like crocodiles. This day was an eye opener.

One other good thing is there’s hardly any queues at the entrance. This is due to a cashless payment system adopted at all KWS park entries, in line with a service charter that limits client processing time to a minimum 5 minutes.

Cashless payments at KWS park entry points, including the snake park – is open to M-Pesa payments, or Visa and Master-card branded bank cards.

In our case, we are Co-op Bank clients.

Entry fees were easily paid via Co-op Bank ATM (Visa) card. This is possible through the bank’s effortless e-Commerce platform that allows instant cash payments by swiping cards at payment points with PDQ/POS machines.

It’s fast, safe and convenient. Within moments of using our Co-op Visa cards, we received account notification messages on mobile phones. It’s easy to track expenses, credits or debits in real time.

Get out of your comfort zone.

To learn more about the convenience of cashless payments through the Co-op Bank e-Commerce platform, visit the nearest Co-op Bank branch.

Alternatively, check online by clicking here.