Temple Monkeys: The Devil’s Work

To anyone with an evil sense of humour, hanging out at a temple with monkeys is a guaranteed source of entertainment.

Gasp as a tourist buys bananas, hands one in the direction of a baby monkey, and is seamlessly mugged by three or four big males.

Bite back advice as a mother thinks it could possibly be a good idea to equip a small child with food for the “nice monkeys” and coaxes her already terrified infant to “feed the babies”.

Like the big guys are going to let that happen, right?

Giggle as a posed photo moves from smiles to nervous laughter to hysterical laughter to plain old-fashioned hysteria…

The Horror! The Horror!

Feeding a monkey is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most people.

And with good reason.

They mug. They rob. They steal food, drink and shiny things.

They can also scratch, bite and pass on ailments ranging from ticks to, more catastrophically, rabies.

Monkeys? They’re evil. Pure, pure evil.

Monkeys under the religious protection of a temple? They’re worse.

Some Treasured Memories

We’ve had some, erm, interesting encounters with temple monkeys over the years. Pretty much Z’s only memory of our trip to Sri Lanka when he was three is of the temple monkey which unzipped our bag, helped itself to his sweets and then sat in a tree, staring at him as he screamed in frustration while she ate them one by one.

Then hopped from tree to tree as he chased, on his small round legs, howling futilely, at ground level. Entering, in fact, stage 2 of the monkey assault reaction: “Futile fist-shaking and rage”.

She had a baby with her. But, by and large, monkey mamas don’t share.

Me? My dominant memory of our ascent of Sigiriya, also in Sri Lanka, a rock that ranks as one of the world’s wonders and is, in some ways, more impressive than Uluru, is the adolescent male monkey that commenced intercourse with our companion’s ear.

She thought it was a finger at first…

Let’s Talk Species

The culprit was, I think, a grey macaque.

They’re the nice monkeys, relatively speaking.

Black macaques? They’re worse. Feed those suckers and they can become sufficiently over-familiar to attempt full-scale vaginal intercourse. (And, no, before you ask, this hasn’t happened to me.)

Though, when you look at their butts, it’s easy to see that they’re, erm, highly sexed.

Met in the wild, it’s wise to avoid eye contact. Contrary to what you might have read or seen in The Jungle Book they take it as a challenge.

(This, incidentally, has happened to me. Big thanks to our guide, who, before our eyes, transformed himself from shortish Bugis guy into virtually the Incredible Hulk, just as Z was beginning to get antsy.)

They’re also substantially bigger than grey macaques. Which have an impressive set of dentition themselves.

Monkey Forest = Better Than You’d Think

All that said, I have a soft spot for Monkey Forest in Ubud, Bali. It’s in the centre of town, set around a forested gorge, with some utterly charming ponds, a pretty stream, strangling figs draping elegant tendrils and some impressively mossy temples and statues.

And, yes, several hundred grey macaques. Some of them ickle cute babies.

And babies, whatever one’s feelings about monkeys in general, still make the heart melt.

Though perhaps not enough to consider keeping one as a pet, an activity apparently popular in Malta, where they favour marmosets. With diapers.

The nice thing about Monkey Forest? It’s firmly on the tourist bus route, meaning there’s always some other sucker around to feed the monkeys.

Although the attendants who help with the feeding process – AKA control the evil critters — take some of the fun out of it for the observer.

Baboons = Evil

Now, I once saw a baboon, on the southernmost tip of South Africa, snatch a video camera and race down a cliff with it.

He moved like lightning.

And, while the owner was still in the first stages of primate-mugging shock – “Did that just happen? Should I wave my fist at it?” and building to the second stage “Let me run after it! No, damn! It’s faster than me!” the ape got bored and, well, dropped the camcorder.

Into, well, coulda been the Indian Ocean. Coulda been the Atlantic. Could just have been some rocks…

Like I said, it was the southernmost tip of Africa.

Video cameras, I kind of get. They’re shiny. Monkeys like that sh*t.

But glasses? Spectacles?

WTF?!

Primates + Cliffs = Trouble

My parents have been visiting us here in Bali the last couple of weeks. And we figured Ulu Watu, a pretty, if heavily-touristed temple set on the cliffs of the southernmost tip of Bali, which gives its name to a frankly terrifying surf break, would be a nice outing to do ahead of their flight out.

On arrival, signs request that you remove and conceal glasses, hats and belts, since the monkeys like to steal them.

Neither of my parents can see more than about 5 metres without their glasses. Which, given we’d come for the view, was a bit of a bummer, really.

Whatevs. I should have known better.

Particularly once the first previously-spectacled Korean tourist started howling in shock.

But I didn’t.

So my ma and I figure that, given her glasses are attached to a string around her neck, she might as well put them on to look at that view.

Well…

Monkeys = Ninjas

Those suckers move like absolute lightning. Z saw the big male making its move, and entered stage zero of the monkey assault thought process, the “Uh-oh! It’s going to do something bad, something very bad…” stage.

By the time his mouth opened, the monkey had ripped the spectacles off granny’s face, off the string around her neck, and retreated to the clifftop wall.

Where he squatted with that “Yeah, buddy? Wanna make something of it?” facial and body language which makes primate thieves of all species so bloody annoying.

I apologise for the absence of photos. But I figured it would be more diplomatic to make helpful gestures than whip out the camera, plus for all I knew one of the bastards would have snatched that too.

Monkey Helpers = Expensive

Enter the monkey attendant. He whips out a piece of banana. The monkey clenches it in one paw, clings to the glasses with the other, gestures in the universal thug language of “what else you got?”

Attendant pulls out a fruit in a plastic bag.

Monkey grabs this, clings to glasses, gestures for seconds.

He produces his final card. An egg.

The monkey cannot fit the egg, the banana, the plastic-wrapped fruit and the glasses into his two front paws.

He thinks for a nano-second, drops the glasses. Then realises his mistake, and goes back for the specs.

The attendant makes a punching gesture, far more authoritative than any an amateur could manage. The glasses are retrieved.

That will be, says the attendant, 50,000 rupiah for the monkey food.

“Bugger!” says my mother. “I was beginning to like this country and now I hate it all over again.”

Have you got a monkey story you’d like to share? Or do you like the creatures? What animals represent evil to you? Let’s have a heated debate!