Monday, March 2, 2015

The Monkey Temple: Why did I keep doing this to myself?

After the night of lizards and insects, Hye Jin and I headed to the monkey temple to experience more nature.

A couple years ago, Elaine and I went to a monkey park in Japan where the monkeys are running around with you and it was completely terrifying. The workers fed all the monkeys at the same time, which meant they were sprinting at you all at the same time. Absolutely horrifying.

Apparently, I briefly forgot about this when I agreed to go to the monkey park.

The result?

It was frightening.

The babies were adorable but the adults had very large teeth and were mildly terrifying.

At one point, a woman working there selling bananas was waving a stick and yelling at monkeys to back off.

One of the problems had to do with the fact that the monkeys had learned from past human idiots .
Said idiots carried around their water bottles and food, which meant they immediately became targets for monkey theft.

Monkey theft involved monkeys jumping at you and/or climbing up your body to access your food or water bottles.

Or sunglasses.

Or flip flops.

Or  purses.

Or cameras.

I didn't have this happen to me but witnessed a lot of attempted thefts and a few successful ones. At one point, a monkey stole someone's keys and ran up a tree. 30 minutes later, that monkey was still high up in the tree holding the man's keys. Or woman's keys. The keys involved furry key chains.

Don't believe the friendly, smiling face

This monkey had learned that water came out of the faucet there and was drinking from it contentedly.

Oh hello baby monkey.

The babies were adorable. I will give them that.

These monkeys were sitting nicely next to each other. When I took a picture, they immediately started "wrestling."

Aka, I accidentally took a couple very inappropriate monkey pictures. Whoops.

This happened one other time. Two monkeys nicely sitting next to each other. I walk over to take a picture and BAM! Coitus!

This guy was pretty relaxed.

As was this one. "Just groom me."

The monkey temple was located in a forest and was in a very beautiful area that just happened to be completely infested with monkeys.

It is a nature reserve and a Hindu temple. In 2011, 605 monkeys lived in the 27 acres of forest. Apparently, now there are a lot more. They live in 4 separate groups throughout the forest. According to the monkey forest website, "The monkeys have lost their fear of humans; they invariably approach human visitors in a large group and grab any bags containing food that the humans have. They may also grab bags not containing food. The visitor will notice the interesting phenomenon of numerous obese monkeys, a testament to the almost unbounded food supply the huge number of tourists entering the forest provide."

The monkeys are crab-eating macaques. They're the same species I saw at the Batu Caves in Malaysia (to be written about later).

"The ground tastes really delicious!"

When they were eating nicely, they were cute, but that didn't happen very often.

"This temple is simply shocking!"
Here is one sitting among his leftovers.

"I'm so sleepy. Rub my back!"

 "There's something very interesting over there!"

"Why must the baby always eat? Sigh."

Here is a baby drinking from a water bottle.

This might have been the monkey who stole the keys.
This monkey definitely stole a water bottle.

This monkey was calmly playing with his stick. He was cuter than others.

Part of the temple.

"I'm so bored. I hate it here. There's nothing to do. Nobody to play with."

This monkey had buckteeth.
He kind of reminds me of the fish in "Finding Nemo." The one with the teeth and the lisp that yells out, "Oh my gosh! Nemo is swimming out to sea!"

The breastfeeding monkeys weren't scary since they were busy protecting their offspring.

A lot of the smaller monkeys copied the older generations and the way they would eat their fruit, but they weren't very successful.

This monkey was using the stick to pick up ants and eat them, which was very resourceful of him.

The baby was very adventurous.


After the monkey temple, we headed into the town of Ubud and wandered around, but that will be the next blog!

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