Imagine this: you’ve just bought six delicious snacks from a hawker at the train station. You’ve eaten five, they’ve all been pretty darn good. And then you bite into number six, which is when you find this guy: an entire skink.
That’s allegedly what happened on Tuesday to Junto Gaewpuong, whose story has been going viral on social media this week.
The 62-year-old woman discovered the skink — a small lizard belonging to the Scincidae family, for you biologists — jammed into a traditional Thai “Khao Lam” (roasted rice snack wrapped in bamboo) that she had purchased at the Surin Railway station.
Junto told Thairath in a broadcast interview that she obtained the snacks while waiting for a train back to Surin after visiting cousins in Nonthaburi province are about 4am.
When she encountered a vendor — a woman she estimated to be in her 40s — hawking the treats outside, she asked to buy five of them for TBH20 (about 60 cents) each.
Junto thought it was her lucky day when the lady gave her an extra one for free. She only realized how lucky, when she got to that final, extra piece.
“I only took one bite of the last snack. I cracked the bamboo open [to make it easier to eat] and found the skink. I was so both shocked and nauseous!” Junto told TV reporters, we assume were nodding furiously in agreement.
“I felt sorry for the creature though. I’m probably not going to buy this snack any more.”
Well, sure.
As the interview wrapped, Junto added a simple plea for all food vendors out there to be mindful about the cleanliness of their product, a plea we are fully on board with.
The story comes just weeks after a tourist in Thailand said she found a lizard of her own in a snack, not from a humble vendor, but in a high-end bag of salted egg fish skins from a Singaporean firm. We’ll leave you to be the judge of which was more egregious.
