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Leonard Ncube, In Victoria Falls
VICTORIA Falls Snake Pit has become a tourism hit in the resort town with scores of people both local and international flocking to the place.

Daily, people jostle to catch a glimpse of different kinds of snakes in cages at Landela Complex.

The place complements other tourist attraction sites such as the crocodile farm, elephant ride, lion walk and game drives where tourists interact with wild animals.

Snake Pit manager Mrs Rina Greenland, told Business Chronicle that the place was opened last year and has been getting significant visitors locally and from countries such as Russia and others in Europe and America as well as Zambia and Botswana.

“We opened in June 2016, and we have had a lot of tourists coming from Russia and other western countries.

“Our aim is to make people happy and feel the experience of seeing snakes,” she said in a recent interview.

The place has different types of snakes such as puff adders, pythons, mambas, cobras, anaconda, Gabon vipers and rattle snakes among others.

There is also has an albino crocodile.

In fact 73 snakes from 43 different types are kept at the site.

The oldest nicknamed Satan is 40 years old.

Mrs Greenland said the snake place was an initiative of Bulawayo-based Mr Norman Crooks.

“Mr Crooks has been collecting snakes since he was a child. He has passion of protecting them because they are becoming extinct.

Mrs Green said among the visitors to the place were pupils from different schools around the country that visit Victoria Falls. It costs $7 for foreign tourists, $5 for locals and $2 for kids to enter the Snake Pit.

A “Hwange boy” Mr Peter Pejani Mwembe, is the snake catcher.

He said he developed the passion after working for Mr Crooks as a domestic worker and now helps Victoria Falls community clear snakes that stray into residential areas.

“We release them into the bush because we can’t keep all of them here,” said Mr Mwembe, who was born in Gulambila in Hwange.

Mr Mwembe uses a golf stick modified into a snake stick to catch the snakes. The caged snakes are fed on frogs, day old chicks, fish and rodents.

— @ncubeleon.