Well this had to be certainly the most interesting temple I visited in Malaysia. The Snake Temple in Bayan Lepas is a temple full of Crotalinae snakes aka Pit Vipers. These snakes have long hollow fangs which will inject you with a proteotoxic venom, this type of venom wont paralyse you but will eat away at you from the inside out. The venom is basically a highly-evolved digestive fluid which will start destroying your cells, blood and muscle tissues… so I tried hard not to scare them too much with the flash.

The only other thing you will notice in Snake Temple is the stink of all the burning incense. It is the sacred smoke from the incense which is supposed to render the snakes harmless, considering I saw an old man milking one of the snakes I consider this very doubtful.

Snake Temple was build around 1875 for the memory of a Buddhist monk called Cheng-Swee Chor-Soo Kong, or Chor Soo Kong for short. A monk was traveling from China in the 1800s to Penang and had a statue on him of Chor Soo Kong and talked of great myths and legends of this deity’s power as a healer. In 1873 when David Brown, a British resident found out about Chor Soo Kong and prayed to him he was apparently cured of an illness. It return for his cure David Brown donated a tract of his land so a temple could be built for the homage of Chor Soo Kong.

Malayisa Travel Photos