SETBO VILLAGE, CAMBODIA — Being responsible parents, rice farmer Khuorn Sam Ol and his wife are not expected to be interested in their son playing with a 16-foot-long, 220-pound snake.
However, they are not fazed that their 7-year-old son, Uorn Sambath, regularly sleeps in the female python’s enormous ring, rides the reptile, kisses it and even caresses it with baby powder.
“There is a special bond between them,” said Khuorn Sam Ol. “My son played with the snake when he was still learning to crawl. “They used to sleep together in a crib.”
The boy and his snake have become a tourist attraction in the village of Setbo, about 12 miles south of the capital, Phnom Penh, as well as a source of amazement for locals.
“People sometimes call the boy and the snake husband and wife,” said Cheng Raem, a 48-year-old neighbor. “Maybe they were a couple from a previous life.”
The boy and the snake grew up together, ever since the python slithered into the family home when Uorn Sambath was 3 months old. His 39-year-old mother, Kim Kannara, discovered the reptile, then the size of a thumb, coiled under a woven rug on her bed.
Khuorn Sam Ol took the snake and released it in some bushes next to a river, but one morning two weeks later he found it inside the house. He decided to keep it and named it Chamroeun, which means “progress” in English.
He came to believe that the snake possesses a magical spirit that understands what it says and protects the family from mistakes. The snake has its own 7-by-10-foot room with a spirit house in which Khuorn Sam Ol prays that the python will keep his family happy and healthy. The snake is so familiar with her son, one of four children, that it would never attack him, she said.
According to Nikolai Doroshenko, a Russian snake expert who lives in Cambodia, it is true that pythons rarely attack humans unless provoked.
But there is still an element of fun in allowing any young child to play with a large python with a grip powerful enough to break bones, said Doroshenko, who runs the Snake House guesthouse in the southwestern city of Sihanoukville, with its own snake collection. and other reptiles.
Chamroeun, who takes three adults to carry, eats about 22 pounds of chicken meat each week, putting a big burden on the family, Khuorn Sam Ol said.
His meals also used to be a spiritual cuisine, when he was fed live rats and chickens. Concerned that they were carrying out the Buddhist injunction against living beings, Khuorn Sam Ol said the snake finally answered his prayers to stop eating live animals.
Wildlife and police officers used to come to try to take the snake and put it in a zoo. But they relented after seeing Uorn Sambath lovingly hugging the reptile. They left with some photos they took of the boy and the snake together, Khuorn Sam Ol said.
“I won’t let anyone take it away from me either. “I love her very much,” declared her son, Uorn Sambath, kissing his pet on the head.
