Monkey Town: Population 1,000

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

When my friend Giles and I stepped off a jangling, third-class train in Lopburi, Thailand, I expected the monkeys to be there, waiting. They would scamper up and poke our legs, I thought, or at least glance over and grunt at us from the nearest rooftop. If the filthy little scamps were at the station stealing food or throwing handfuls of their own feces, that would be an acceptable greeting, too.


I hadn’t formed these expectations reading a guidebook. Another traveler, a friend of a friend, had promised we would find Lopburi “completely overrun” with monkeys. Her effusive but vague description (“they’re everywhere, it’s amazing”) let me fill in the blanks, and I filled them with monkeys: a monkey on every doorstep, monkeys lining the gutters and crowning the street signs.


Lopburi, 95 miles north of Bangkok, was an alternate Thai capital in the 17th century. Around that time, a pack of long-tailed macaques moved into town from the surrounding jungles and set up camp at a shrine for a Hindu god, Phra Karn. The locals came to believe that the animals carried Phra Karn’s spirit, and accordingly, the monkeys got fed.


Encouraged partly by Buddhism, which teaches not to harm living things, and mostly by tourism, which brings curious and moneyed Westerners like me to an otherwise un remarkable town, the urban monkey population in Lopburi has now grown to more than 1,000.


At the train station that day, stopping off on our way further north, the only monkey Giles and I could spy was 12 feet tall and made of cement. It perched on a wall alongside the station’s platform, its tail raised above an all-too-anatomically correct rear end.


Confused, I hailed a three-wheeled bicycle cab and asked the driver to take us to Phra Narairatchaniwet, King Narai’s palace, the 17th-century tourist attraction I had read about (on Thanon Ratchadamnoen, with an entrance off Thanon Sorasak). I assumed the palace lawns would be a hotbed for the living attraction we wanted to see.


I was wrong. The palace grounds proved well kept, hazy with heat, and as devoid of monkeys as my backyard in Brooklyn. From a vendor outside the front gates, I bought a small tray of grilled coconut cakes to soothe our growing sense of disappointment. We wandered down the block, still nibbling on the cakes, and passed a group of young men lounging next to their parked motorcycles.


Guessing the bikers didn’t speak much English, Giles initiated a one-word conversation: “Monkeys?”


“Aah, monkeys. Ha, ha. Monkeys,” they answered, nodding and smiling.


The guys started their bikes, and we hopped on the backs of the two closest ones. They zipped us along the streets we’d just been peddled through, then stopped at a busy traffic circle a few blocks from the train station. We thanked our chauffeurs with the equivalent of a dollar, and they sped away.


In front of us, right off the busy road, rose a small wat, a Buddhist temple. A ring of grass and tamarind trees encircled the building, San Phra Kan, the site of the monkeys’ historic hangout (near the railroad tracks, on Thanon Wichayen). Ropes and miniature ladders had been nestled in the tree branches, and the grass was piled with green papaya, cabbage husks, and overripe mangoes. Still, sadly, we could see no monkeys.


After walking around the temple eyeing the untouched feast, I was ready to give up. Then I saw the monkey in the traffic circle. An adult male standing stooped at a foot-and-a-half tall, he waited casually on the dotted line between two lanes. Cars slowed and passed him on either side. During a break in traffic, he ambled toward a shady street corner opposite the wat.


Giles and I followed. In front of a hardware store, next to a restaurant, our eyes adjusted to the shade, and there they were: dripping from the electrical lines above our heads, tearing holes in a vinyl billboard advertising real estate, and ignoring us completely. Thai passers-by looked at the monkeys with no more interest than New Yorkers might when glancing at a pigeon.


I saw babies, their fur still blue-tinged, clinging to their mothers’ undersides. Adolescents chased each other on wobbly limbs, in and out through the billboard’s holes. Two adults had gorged on so many hand-outs that their flesh had stretched out their pelts, and they just sat there, bald and absurdly fat. Other adults were lithe and mangy, with scheming, gray faces.


All of the monkeys’ eyes and hands looked human, but their thin, brown coats could have belonged to rats. Standing there, I felt surrounded by naughty, manipulative children – except that the children had fur and possibly also rabies. (The Lopburi Zoo’s monkey hospital was founded in 2003 to treat sick and injured monkeys and stop the spread of epidemics.)


I didn’t know then of a useful lesson from Jane Goodall. When simians laugh, they bare their bottom teeth. When they show their top teeth, it’s a sign of aggression. Not thinking about Jane Goodall, and happy to see the monkeys, I smiled the genuine, human way, with two rows of big white teeth, and some threatening, pink upper gums.


An adult, bigger than the one I first spotted, walked over to deal with me. He sat on a curb near my feet, locked his brown eyes with mine, and opened his mouth in a severe, breathy hiss. It worked; I stopped smiling and backed away.


We crossed another street toward a different temple, Phra Prang Sam Yot (on Thanon Wichayen, near the Muang Thong Hotel), where even more monkeys roosted. A 30 Baht fee, or about 75 cents each, bought us admission, which came with a bamboo monkey-beating stick. I didn’t hit any of them with it, but smacked the ground when three more hissers approached and circled.


A small female momentarily convinced us that the stick was a toy, and hung from one end


while Giles swung her back and forth. It wasn’t long before she wound her way onto his shoulders, where I caught her reaching inside his backpack for the last of the cakes. Pulling her hand out of the bag, I was surprised by how soft her palm felt, and how sharp her fingernails.


Within a few minutes, it was Giles’s hand I was pulling, suggesting we head back to the train station. Touching those tiny, hairy fingers had given me unpleasant ideas. I imagined swarms of monkeys landing on my back and shredding me with their nails and teeth – a fear strengthened and confused by that fact that I still, intermittently, wanted to hug the smallest ones. I hadn’t expected them to be so cute.


The New York Sun

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