The monkeys have taken over!!!

Our next stop was to head north more into central Thailand to a small town named Lopburi.

It is one of the oldest towns in Thailand and it's very well known for it's monkeys. They are supposed to be everywhere, running on roofs, stealing food, smearing poo on windshields, etc...

How cool is that. So we hopped onto a train from Bangkok and arrived in Lopburi 3 hours later.

We were initially disappointed to see only a couple monkeys on the power lines but thought, tomorrow will be better.

Well...tomorrow came and we set out to see some cool ruins around town but upset to see no monkeys. Jenni ended up making a comment about not seeing any and about 5 seconds after she said it, I see a whole gang of them running up the street. I pointed them out to Jenni and we started to do all the picture taking we could get.

After a few shots, we ended up walking over to and old temple which must be their stomping grounds because they were everywhere. It's amazing how close you could get to them. Of course, we had a bit of hesitation. Are they going to attack us? We weren't sure how close we could get. But we still took as many pics as possible.

At one point, I was just standing around when I feel something grab on to my pant leg. Oh SH#T, I'm being attacked...I was preparing to feel sharp claws or teeth sink in to me somewhere but I guess they have hands pretty much like ours and their nails weren't sharp at all. I wonder who clips their nails???? At the same time, I think another monkey hopped on as well but I wasn't too sure since I was still kinda freaked out as to what they were going to do to me.

The little bugger started to climb all over my day pack and I'm wondering what he's doing when all of a sudden I hear big splashes of liquid hitting the ground.

"Great, he's peeing on me now!" I thought! But I am glad I was wrong. The guy hopped off me with our water bottle in hand (upside down mind you with all the liquid splashing onto the grass) and ran off.

Somehow the second guy got off (I think a local helped me get him off) and he ran off. Whew...what an experience. But it wasn't over....

We're inside still taking pics of the little babies, some squabbles between the group etc, when another cute little guy comes up and hops right on. He climbs up and start noseying around, pulling on this and that, trying to bite my watch and clean my ears out apparently. Very cute and friendly, until it came time to get him off. He didn't like Jenni trying to shoo him away and would hiss from his perch on top of my head everytime she tried. So I ended up taking off the day pack which he went for (thank god he couldn't lift it otherwise it would have been gone) then I flailed my arm and went a bit aggressive, which got me a hiss and I lost the friend I just made.

It's better that way anyways. He was a wee bit TOO friendly.

I managed to get a video of the fiasco, but arm shot videos are a bit hard to take. It is kinda amusing though.

As a final note, to show maybe I shouldn't have let them get on me in the first place, we saw a lady in a tour group who had gotten bitten by a monkey. You could see the teeth marks, but no blood. Not sure what happened to provoke it but I guess, in the end, these were still wild animals and we need to realize that they could be territorial and you never know what would set them off.

I hope she's ok. Me; I went home and showered...