MONKEY SEE, MONKEY JUMP ON ME

Macaque mother with newborn in Lop Buri, Thailand.

Sally is always on the lookout for the offbeat, so Lop Buri was high on our list. Why Lop Buri? Because we hadn’t seen any monkeys yet and we needed a fix. Sally, Daniel and I were taking a train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and decided to stop for one night in Lop Buri.

As the train arrived at the station we were greeted with two giant statues of golden macaque monkeys. Okay, this is promising. We saw a few more macaques on the street as we walked to our hotel.

After checking into our hotel in Old Town, we looked out the window and hanging on the cage-like bars were monkeys looking in on us. Down on the street were more monkeys.

As we discovered, this area was monkey central and we were on the edge of it.

We were warned that the monkey will try to grab anything they can get, so we were trying to be careful as we walked around that next morning. Some people even carry monkey sticks. If a monkey steals anything at all such as a camera, glasses, food, it will be gone. They are amazingly fast and can climb anything.

Lots of good photo ops, so as I was taking a picture of a macaque, another suddenly caromed off my back. Then he was gone. I never saw him, but Sally and Daniel did. As I said, they are fast. No harm done, just a playful macaque having a little fun.