Bellevue Hotel on Penang Hill comes with an unadvertised attraction: free-ranging Wagler's pit vipers that dangle from the vines overgrowing the back patio. There, one can sip tea and gaze at the rooftops of Georgetown under the lidless glare of dozing snakes or dine beneath the bellies of gentle green serpents.
The adults are quite docile, so long as one doesn't actually get one's duck in their personal sphere of comfort, but the juveniles are said to be fouler in temperament and those above the porch were certainly much more active than their elders who meditated on the same perch for days. The vipers are the same species as those benumbed by aromatic fumes at the island's famed Snake Temple and seem not uncommon on the hill's forested slopes. But for guests with unwelcome affinities for scaly things, the rooms at the Bellevue are helpfully well insulated against legless intruders, if not lonesome nightwatchmen...
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