I feel it’s only fair to warn you now that if you’re about to go travelling, it will make you dislike monkeys.
“But monkeys are so cute?” I hear you cry.
I thought so too, until I travelled in Asia, a lot.
The first place I stopped on this trip to Asia was India where I spent two months. I met up with a friend of mine who lives there at the start. We travelled round a few places in the northern India together (apparently it worried her slightly when she realised I was planning to do the whole thing on my own). My friend only had a week off work so we’d had to plan where we were going but we didn’t really research what we were going to do in each place.
One day in Jaipur we were sat in a tuk-tuk asking the driver about what we should go see. He enthusiastically said “The monkey temple”.
As the words “Yey, monkeys are so cute…” were leaving my mouth, my friend went “Ugh I hate monkeys”.
Me: “Huh? What’s wrong with you? Who hates monkeys?!?”
My friend “Me. Monkeys are horrible. You wait, you’ll see.”
I hate to admit it but she was right. Monkeys are horrible.
If you get bitten by one rabies is the least of your worries and it can require up to a year’s worth of treatment to make sure you haven’t caught anything even more undesirable.
And then there’s the fact that they steal your shit. Food, phones, sunglasses, bags; it’s all fair game as far as monkeys are concerned. I actually had a monkey leapfrog over my back to make a surprise attack on my friend and try to grab her phone when we were at Uluwatu Temple. That same monkey later sat on the wall as we were leaving the area we’d visited, guarding the way out on all fours, baring his teeth and growling in a way I didn’t even know monkeys could.
Telling people you don’t like monkeys may be an error though. It recently lead to one being tied to my bike just to wind me up.
Monkeys are scary. They bite, they scratch and they steal. But hey, if you want to hangout with them knock yourself out. Personally I’d rather steer clear.
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