We skipped the Elephant festival in Surin but we made sure to hit Lopburi for their annual monkey festival, featuring mounds of fruits, candies, sweets and, of course, hundreds of monkeys! November 29, 2009
We skipped the Elephant festival in Surin but we made sure to hit Lopburi for their annual monkey festival, featuring mounds of fruits, candies, sweets and, of course, hundreds of monkeys!
The tiny town of Lopburi would be unremarkable but for several troupes of monkeys (long-tailed macaques) that live wild in the streets. In other monkey-ridden towns, the monkeys get into everything and annoy the residents. In Lopburi, however, they enjoy a special revered status as the town residents honor their role in the Ramakien (the Thai Ramayana, in which the Monkey King assisted the hero, Ram, in his battle against the demons). To keep the mischief down, the local monastery feeds the monkeys every day, and everyone generally seems to get along. But once a year, the town throws a party for the monkeys, and we made sure to be there for that.
In the morning, we got up and took the early train from Bangkok. We chatted with other travellers also heading to Lopburi, and arrived around 10am, hoping we hadn't missed anything good yet. I have no idea how early monkeys wake up, but when it's Christmas for monkeys, I imagine they'd be ready to go well before Santa Claus is done putting all the fruits on the tree. Once off the train, we walked with the crowd down the street to a huge gathering of people clogging up the diminutive temple grounds surrounding the city's central ruins. Oddly, the throngs of people were completely ignoring the monkeys clambering all over the prangs of the ruined Wat, and instead watching several paragliders coming in for a landing in the central bullseye. An announcer said things in Thai as each person touched down and the crowd cheered. We watched the monkeys. We watched the monkeys for about 8 hours, and I'm not sure I grew tired of it.
The set for the festival was crazy. There were several canopies completely covered with fruit decorations and a long line of plaster figures depicting monkeys in human costumes (business suits, nurses' outfits, overalls, etc.) The pièce(s) de résistance were the dozen long tables of every treat imaginable of wrapped candies, unwrapped candies, fruits in their skins, fruits cut up on plates, bottles of Pepsi, bottles of water, and so on. Only pictures can do the scene justice, and even then not so well.
The monkeys didn't attack the tables of snacks right away, or the decorated canopies, and it took the humans a while to get around to inviting the monkeys to go for it, but when they eventually did, things got wild. At first, the tourists (mostly Thai tourists—not many Western tourists were in attendance) started feeding monkeys things they bought from the concession stand: hot dogs, Thai iced tea, snow cones (!?), bags of chips, and so on. Then the festival workers started bringing out trays of fruit pieces, calling "Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma," to get the monkeys' attention. The monkeys loved the durian fruit so much, and crowded around the tray, boldly jumping onto the workers' shoulders, or climbing up onto any of the gawking tourists and sitting on heads, shoulders, purses, grabbing at the fruit, or the person's hair, bag straps, and all the nonsense that monkeys can manage without working at it.
I was still using my cane and walking slowly, but it turned out to be a lot of fun since the monkeys became curious about it and some confident ones decided to climb up it to see what there might be at the top. I was taken by surprise the first time, but then I prepared myself and started keeping a couple of peanuts in my fist so that any such daring monkey who ventured forth and up would be rewarded with a treat. And the monkeys loved peanuts almost as much as they loved sunflowers, which is slightly less than durian, I think.
As far as the sunflowers go, the monkeys seemed to eat different courses in shifts. At first they were mostly into fruits such as banana and other soft fruits, and then they ate candy, and then they wanted peanuts, and then durian. When they got to sunflowers nothing could stop them from going after the floppy yellow flowers with a vengeance. There are fields and fields of Mexican sunflowers growing in Thailand, and what the monkeys love about them is taking the flower itself and picking out the seeds and eating them. Their nimble fingers will work over the brown field of seeds in the middle of the bloom, deftly pulling the seeds out one at a time to eat.
The monkeys were curious about everything. One monkey played with a compact mirror for about an hour, engrossed in the reflected image not of herself but of whatever was next to her. She kept twisting the mirror this way and that and looking at it out of the corner of her eye, looking for I don't know what but hoping to catch sight of it at any unpredictable moment with her tiny mirror. We gave another monkey one of our stickers and delighted to see him play with it and peel off the backing. Yet another monkey dashed forward and stole something from a woman's purse. He retreated to a safe distance and began to investigate his pilfered treasure, which turned out to be a disappointing packet of sanitary wipes.
There's a hierarchy of monkeys in the troupe. The oldest monkeys are the biggest, and they can boss around any smaller monkey they want, and do so whenever any smaller monkey has something interesting. The middle monkeys boss the small monkeys, who in turn chase the babies who are foolish enough to explore away from their mothers. Ordinarily the babies clung to their mothers' backs or bellies and stuck their lips out to get a drink from a water puddle or reached out grab something interesting, but had the least amount of knowledge about the world around them. The small monkeys, freshly out on their own, were cute and unthreatening, and so we tried feeding them water from a water bottle. There are a couple problems with this, though. First, the young monkeys don't know how to drink from a bottle. On their own, they are more likely to reach inside the bottle with their tiny hands to try and get to the water, or when that doesn't work, they'll pour the water out onto the ground and lap it up from the dirt. If a larger monkey sees a young one with a water bottle (even if a human is assisting in the drinking, which is a big help to the ignorant young monkeys), the larger one will chase away the littler one and take the bottle for himself. The middle monkeys have a little more experience. They know to put the opening of the bottle to their lips and tip the bottle sideways to get the water to pour out into their mouth. But they don't know how to get the last bit of water, so they leave the bottle there and look for another small monkey to bully. When an elder monkey decides to have some water, he or she can have whatever she wants. Whether it's an abandoned bottle or one currently in use, the large monkey takes it away and shows the power of his worldly experience, skillfully tipping the bottle all the way up to get all the water from it. The oldest monkeys are self-centered, demanding and unafraid of humans, so naturally, we're afraid of them. The oldest monkeys don't want to be fed water from a bottle; they want to do it themselves, which defeats the photo opportunity. We tried feeding water to several small monkeys, but unless one is careful to do this out of sight range of the larger monkeys, one will notice what is going on and come over and take the bottle away for himself [and scream at you with big, sharp-looking teeth if you don't let it go --Ryan ].
A couple orangutans from a local wildlife park made special guest appearances and the difference in intelligence between the monkeys and the apes was astonishing and quite noticeable. The baby orangutan was sleeping, but a three year old girl was interested in the crowd of people around her. She was curious about my cane (but didn't want her to climb it, of course) and shook my hand in thanks for a cup of water I gave her, which she skillfully drank and then wiped her mouth on her arm. Her skin, hair and all, was so human looking, with all the same musculature, lines and creases, mannerisms [even placement of the visible blood veins --Ryan]. Her calm civility was a welcome refreshment after the chaotic antics of the wild monkeys.
We did wander through the town a bit for lunch, and found that not all the monkeys in town were attending the festival. It's a funny sight to see monkeys playing in the power lines, scampering across roofs, and looking in store windows, etc. I don't recall seeing any dogs, so I don't know how they might get along.
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