And now for something completely different... If you did not think l travelling is already stressful enough! How about arriving in your hotel room and finding Python in the toilet...  Indeed that is exactly what greeted a female guest in a Maastricht (Holland) hotel room last week.   The more than 2.5 meter long snake had escaped from the room below and via the sewer made its way upstairs.  In the downstairs room hotel staff also found a veritable mini-zoo consisting of 'arrow poison frogs', caterpillars, gecko's, salamanders and even a baby crocodile!

Earlier in the day hotel staff had seen 2 guests looking for something in the garden and because they suspected that the pair would leave without paying they inspected the room and discovered 30 exotic animals.  Animal welfare authorities took charge of the wildlife and determined that for 18 of the animals no proper documentation could be produced by the guests.  The police arrested 3 man and a woman from Rome.

You have to feel sorry for some hotel cleaning staff.  A recent survey by Kayak.com produced some very interesting responses ranging from the macabre (a dead body) to the disturbing (a live Tarantula).  Other responses included, a prostetic leg, a broken leather whip, a hotel security guard asleep on the bed, a naked man in the shower...

Stranded in Dallas, Taxas, one lady reported... 'My room had a couple of bullet holes in the wall opposite the door. When I woke up in the morning, after minimal sleep, there was a very large, black scorpion crawling on that wall'

Bible money... another person wrote in as follows... 'I found a $100 bill in the Gideon's Bible once. I had never picked one up in a hotel room, but for unexplained reasons, on one stay I opened it up and began leafing through the pages when the money fell out.

I believe in miracles, but I don't believe that was one. But I thank whoever the benefactor was for giving travelers an incentive to open the Bible.

Crime scene... and this guest writes... 'On a marching band trip to Florida in high school, we stayed at a hotel that was more of a "no-tell." The room next to ours was sealed off with the yellow crime scene tape...turns out a prostitute had been murdered there the night before.

Cash... and only a few days ago in South Africa...  A businessman found a stash of R450 000 cash in his Port Elizabeth hotel room - money which turned out to belong to the Indian Premier League team Kings XI Punjab.

Altech Autopage Cellular boss Stephen Blewett said he discovered the money in R100 notes in his hotel room's safe on Tuesday night.

Blewett bundled the money into a laundry bag and took it to reception.

It later emerged that the IPL team had left the money - allowances for food, drinks and other expenses - in that room because they had been using it for meetings.