Kayaker Finds Unexpected Stowaway in Her Kayak (Video)

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Nouria Newman is a French whitewater kayaker, and she recently had an unexpected stowaway that weighed her boat down for about 20 km before its long tail brushed up against her leg. Newman pulled over and realized there was a large lizard in her kayak . . . a very large lizard. She and another woman tried to get the lizard out, and the video of them struggling as the lizard stubbornly tries its hardest to stay in is quite funny.

“Earlier this morning, I thought my boat was really heavy, but I just thought I was really tired,” Newman explains in the video. Turns out, she was lugging around a passenger. The lizard appears to be a monitor lizard, but without location information, it’s hard to say for sure. Regardless, Newman calls it “the biggest animal I ever had inside my kayak.”

Newman keeps a sense of humor about the situation, but she also says it was pretty freaky to suddenly feel something brush up against her leg from inside her boat. She says she initially screamed and tried to move her equipment out of the way so she could see what touched her, but all she could glimpse was that long, thick tail.

Watch as Newman and a comrade try to get a large lizard out of her kayak here: