Actually, Reuters sent their journalist back with a tape measure. He climbed into the enclosure with the director and measured the snake, which ignored him. It was stretched out around the enclosure, not curled up. It moved it's head a bit when he got closer to it so he didn't get an accurate measurement but concluded that it was only 6.5 - 7-ish metres. The director was at first confused as to why the snake had shrunk so much, but after talking to a keeper realised that the snake hadn't eaten for six weeks, so that explained it. Said he would get some dogs to feed it on the next week or two.
But despite the size difference, he still maintained that the snake was 150 years old. He knew this to be an incontrovertible fact because an old man - a snake expert - from a village in Central Java had visited the zoo a few years previously and had told him that was how old he estimated the snake to be. The man's name, and his village is not known.
Hix