I'm glad not to be in Aswan at the moment, but glad to be reminded of a variety of snake-and-scorpion stories--terribly funny in retrospect, though not always at the time.
There was the time a huge one charged our table at a sidewalk café in Nicaragua--large enough so that it made a distinct galloping sound on the pavement. A time I returned to camp in the Serengeti and found the camp guards rousting a black mamba from under one of the tents--food for thought when I retired to my own, entirely floor-less tent, that evening. A time I somehow suspended the laws of gravity and ended up hovering above a coiled, highly-irritated Mojave rattler while running on a trail in Arizona. A time in Mozambique when the person who used the washroom immediately after me asked, wide-eyed and trembling, if I'd seen the cobra in the corner. Et cetera.
To some degree, it's these stories that make travel worthwhile--what if nothing ever went wrong and there was no discomfort or danger? Of course, that's again more easily said in retrospect; I don't habitually go *looking* for these situations, but I do search out the places where they sometimes occur.
Naturally, YMMV.
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