Eating a cobra in Indonesia

Yes, this page is about exactly that! Alena and I went to Singapore for the wedding of a friend of hers, and we arranged a last-minute trip to the city of Jogjakarta in East Java, Indonesia. I just want to tell you the story of our encounter with a cobra in this hastily prepared page. This page uses CSS positioning, so maybe the layout will be pretty terrible if you're using an old browser. You may have to wait a while for all the images to load, as each one is around 64kB.

As you can see from the first photograph, the main purpose of our excursion to Java was to see Buddhist and Hindu temples such as Prambanan, Sukuh and the glorius Borobudur, shown here.

On our way through Solo, to get to Sukuh, we asked our driver to find us somewhere to eat snake, as we had been told by the tour guide at the Royal Palace that it was a local delicacy. As a native of Solo, the driver - whose name has now escaped us - knew where to look, and after a few wrong turns and calls for help after finding that the establishment had just moved to a new location, he landed us at this little wooden shack clearly advertising its wares. Sate cobra is a cobra satay of some sort, but when we arrived it seemed that the cobra sate was off. I had a momentary fear that this would turn into a Two Ronnies Rook Restaurant moment, but they did actually have plenty of cobra that could be eaten in other ways - just fried. Perhaps they had simply run out of skewers. I don't know what Ramuan means.

I've included a photograph of the menu, but as I don't speak a word of bling-blong I don't really know much about what it says. It's a jolly amusing language to read because it's full of loan words from English and Spanish. It seems to be phonetically spelt, with "c" used for "ch". So, chocolate is coklat, and the word for money is curiously like an archaic Spanish word that survives as slang in Venezuela, as Alena pointed out. Conveniently enough, cobra is cobra, taxi is taksi and "Lifejacket is under your seat" is something like pemabalung semala kursi anda, if memory serves me correctly. I'm not entirely sure how much difference there is between Javanese and Malay (the southern dialect of which is the official language of Indonesia), and which of the two the menu is written in. Anyway, it's pretty obvious from the menu that a cobra meal costs 25000 Rupiahs, and that works out at not much more than £1.50. It's awfully silly having such ridiculously low currency units when everything costs virtually nothing in the first place, but that's life.

The cobra house was run by a couple, and you can see them in the following photographs. I'm not going to guess how many Westerners had graced their doorstep before, but they were really engaging despite the communication problem (our driver spoke very little English). We attracted a bit of attention from a few people passing by, and a local couple already awaiting their own cobra feast.

It seems that the best way to eat a cobra is to charm it first, and this was the job of the lady of the house. I'm not sure how ritualistic this was, or whether in fact it's to do with tiring the snake out (or getting it "hissed out") before grabbing hold of its neck. I didn't get a photograph of the man chopping the cobra's head off after it had been charmed, and in no time at all he was busy pulling the skin off the hanging body, as you can see below.

In no time at all the meat and organs were stripped from the body, leaving the tube of ribs and sinews attached to the spine. The skeletal tube was passed back to the woman, who first showed me the organs - heart, liver and meat (shredded up by now) on a small wooden chopping board - as though to say "this is what you're going to eat, white man, and it's a bit too late to change your mind". Gulp.

What happened next was a bit surprising. The woman took the skeletal tube and worked it between her hands to crack and loosen the backbone, I think. Then she carefully used a large toothpick to extract the spinal cord, pulling it out slowly from a starting point between two vertebrae. She got most of it out in one continuous length, after a false start. What I didn't mention earlier is that the cobra's blood had been drained into a small glass as soon as the head had come off, and if you look carefully you will see two such glasses on the bench in the photograph as the woman dangles something over it, the man bending down in front, almost getting in the way. Yes, it's the spinal cord, and it went into the glass with the blood. I get the feeling that the heart also went into the glass, but I'm not really sure. The man was working on my snake whilst the woman prepared the first glass for the other waiting customer. The kettle had just boiled, and she went over to make some tea. The man was busy shredding meat, and I think the other customer's meat was already frying in the wok that you can just see to the far right of the photograph.

Yes, this is it. This is what I was about to drink. A small glass with about 15cl of cobra's blood and a spinal cord. For what we are about to receive, may we be extremely apprehensive. Have a close look at the photo and see the white spinal cord resting at the bottom of the blood.

The other customer, who had downed his blood in one, bade me do the same after my nervous glances in his direction. So I did it. I really didn't want to feel the spinal cord, so down-in-one seemed the best way. I was so jittery about it, my stomach was getting a bit wobbly, but I found that the blood, still warm, tasted like wine. I suppose it was actually rather nice, but Alena seemed to be more than glad that she didn't have to drink any of it. It seemed to be the male preserve.

Strangely enough, I liked the blood more than I liked the tea (in the larger glass), as the latter was horribly sweet...

Alena and I both enjoyed the meat, shredded and fried along with the liver. It's not much to look at, so I haven't put the photos on here. There's surprisingly little meat on a snake: it's all ribcage and stomach. The entire edible portion of the snake neatly covered a plate not much bigger than a teacup saucer.

Well, there you go. We ate a venemous snake and drunk its blood, just five minutes after seeing it hissing and wriggling. Ugh. The other customer left and gave me a good slap on the back as he left, obviously appreciating our braveery in partarking in this local delicacy!

Let's finish off with something a bit more palatable. Back to Singapore, drinking Singapore Slings at the famous Raffles Hotel, with Paul, one of the other wedding guests. Bloody hideous drink. A good way to ruin perfectly drinkable gin.