Scuba and snakes

I've decided to do the rest of my experiences in Kenya by alliteration. Today is scuba and snakes, tomorrow will be running and...rest? Rum? Rainbows? Just kidding, even though my two experiences today really were scuba diving and seeing a snake farm.

I went diving out of Malindi Marine Park this morning with Blue Fin Diving on two sites, Tewa and Papa. The website even provides maps of the dive sites:

They were pretty good dives with reasonably good visibility and a lot of fish and octopi to see (and, at Papa, a large turtle). It was a pretty large group I went diving with (and all Italian...), but they had a lot of dive masters and split us up into small groups, so it was manageable.

After I was done diving, I went out to Watamu to meet up with Dr. Childs for lunch and to head out to Bio-Ken snake farm. But first we had lunch at Ocean Sports Resort, where we had to put up with terrible views like this:

Bio-Ken (http://bio-ken.com/) is a snake farm and research center, with many different missions, including milking snakes for venom to be sent off to India and used to make anti-venoms. I was under the impression before I went that they make the anti-venoms there, but it's too large and expensive of a venture that involves, among other things, injecting horses with increasing amounts of venom until they make antibodies against it.



This is a green mamba, which is one of the most poisonous snakes in Kenya and one that they harvest the venom from. The distribution of the green mamba in Kenya is the light blue and yellow:

We're obviously in the yellow. There's a lot of other cool stuff on the website, if you're interested in learning about snakes and snakebites. Probably wouldn't be very helpful with American snake bites, though (other than the general info on taking care of snake bites: don't apply tourniquets, keep the patient calm, etc).

That was pretty much my day. Tomorrow I'm going to try to get some running in in the morning (before the gym gets ridiculously hot), and then we'll see what happens after that.