Imagine coming back from a business trip only to find a large lizard in your engine compartment. How crazy would that be? Snakes? Yeah that has been s
Imagine coming back from a business trip only to find a large lizard in your engine compartment. How crazy would that be? Snakes? Yeah that has been seen before under car hoods but a large lizard of the family Varanus?
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A man in Malaysia returning from business trip experienced such an event as he returned from a business trip on Malaysia Langkawi Island. Thum Wai Loong told Channel News Asia that he went on a trip and parked his car in the car park in front of the Kuala Kedah Jetty and hopped a ferry for the short boat ride to Langkawi. He stayed one night on the island and returned the next day.
When he drove off in his car he heard a tapping sound coming from the engine compartment and pulled over to check the engine. He popped the hood and saw a large tail and immediately dropped the hood, unsure of what he was dealing with. He then called a friend who came to investigate. Loong’s friend called the RELA Corps – a volunteer community service group in Malaysia who then attempted to remove the large monitor lizard from the engine compartment to no avail. After trying to wrest the lizard out of the engine compartment for 10 minutes, the volunteers let the lizard go. The lizard proceeded to crawl through and under the engine and left in a big drainage ditch next to the car.
Loong told Channel News Asia that he didn’t get a full body shot of the lizard but estimated it to be about 5 feet in length, noting that the tail was around 2.5 feet. Loong posted a video of the encounter on his Facebook page and it received more than 6,500 likes in just a few days with some netizens cracking crude jokes, with some saying that the lizard was just trying to directly “monitor’ engine problems!
Monitor lizards (Varanus spp.) are native to Eastern India and Sri Lanka, eastward through Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. They can grow to more than 8 feet in length, though most average around 5 feet in length.
John B. Virata keeps a ball python, two corn snakes, a king snake, and two leopard geckos. His first snake, a California kingsnake, was purchased at the Pet Place in Westminster, CA for $5. Follow him on Twitter @johnvirata
