More Monkeys Than You Can Shake a Stick At
Part 4 of the 'I Heart Thailand' series

While in Bangkok we took a day trip to Ayutthaya (the old capital of Thailand) and Lopburi. As Joleen says, we got up at the butt-crack of dawn and made our way to the train station in Bangkok via the skytrain (which was very handy and near to our hotel). We should have just missed the train to Ayutthaya and had to wait another hour for the next one--which would have sucked--but fortunately the train was delayed so we made it onto that one. It costs like a dollar for a 2 hour ride. Not too shabby.

We arrived in Ayutthaya and after slight confusion upon leaving the train station, we successfully made our way to the river where we had to take a little boat thing across it (and after being occosted by tuk tuk drivers). Originally we were going to rent a bike to explore the ruins (ruins being the primary reason of going to Ayutthaya) but decided not to because we decided it wouldn't be worth our while and it wasn't a bike-friendly looking place. So we walked. It was super hot and we were both wearing pants since we didn't know if you had to wear pants in the wat ruins or not. You didn't, so it kinda sucked that we were wearing pants in 90,000 degree heat. We walked a hell of a long way, too.

We found the ruins and explored a while. They were pretty cool. The ruins were full of headless Buddhas. We were then on a quest to get a picture of one of us standing behind a Buddha so our head was on the Buddha body. But you weren't supposed to do this and they had sentinel people standing guard at various places, so we had to be really covert about it. We finally found one that Joleen could stand behind just pretending to be standing there while I stood back a bit and pretended to be taking a picture of the building behind her. We had to tkae it quick, however, so the pic ain't that great. See it included here. There was a cool Buddha head thing in a giant tree. We saw one ruin that had 3 dogs sleeping on the stairs. Joleen tells me to take a picture of them, so I approach and they wake up and start visciously barking at us. It was a little frightening. The guard dogs of the ruins.

So we saw our share of the ruins then went back to the train station to catch a train to Lopburi, further north (the monkey pics above are from Lopburi). We had a bit of a wait before the next train came, so we had to sit around a little. There were these 2 foreign guys attempting to buy tickets at a closed ticket booth (you could only buy your ticket 20 m inutes before your train left for whatever reason) so we tried to explain to them how it worked. They knew minimal English at best. They may have been from some sort of Scandinavian country. But hey, we tried. So we board the train for Lopburi...but there's not enough seats so we had to stand in the area between train cars (in the doorway) for a long time. But at least we had some nice breeze and interesting scenery.

Lopburi was hilarious. We went there because it's a town overrun by monkeys. Here is an excerpt from Lonely Planet: Thailand on Lopburi:

Monkey Trouble

More than any other city in Thailand, Lopburi is a city besieged by monkeys. The city's original troop of monkeys (actually a type of macaque) inhabits the San Phra Khan (Kala Shrine) during the day and then crosses the street in the evening to roost in the halls of Prang Sam Yot. At some time in the past, the band split into two factions. The splinter troop, lead by a half-blind dominant male, gave up the sanctity of the shrine for the temptations of the city. These renegades can be seen making nuisances of themselves by swinging from shop fronts and smearing excrement on the windshields of parked cars. Many human residents of the old city have been forced to attach special monkey foils to their television antennas, lest simian antics spoil TV reception. Some locals even swear that the city-dwelling monkeys have been known to board trains for other provinces, returning to Lopburi once their wanderlust is spent.

How hilarious is that?? So on the way to the shrine where the monkeys apparently reside we stopped at a 7-Eleven (which are all over Asia, by the way) and we both got slurpees. When we got to the monkey place we still had our slurpees. We paid the lady at the entrance to the shrine/wat (ruins) and upon entering immediately saw a few monkeys. We get all excited. One approaches Joleen and stands right next to her. Joleen freaks out at me telling me to get a picture of it standing next to her. "It's so close!!!" The ticket lady also sold us a bag of peanuts to feed the monkeys. This is a bad idea. If any of you ever go there, do not buy the peanuts or bring anyting remotely edible into the area. Joleen says to bring a giant stick instead. Yeah, so we turn the corner and I about have a coronary. There were seriously scores of monkeys there. Little ones, fat-ass ones, you name it. It was great. At first. "Oh, let's feed them the peanuts!" Yeah, so then they began attacking us for our food. They would jump onto your leg and try to grab your stuff. There was a kid there with a slingshot whose job it was to slingshot the monkeys off of people. At one point I had one on my friggin' head while another was on my leg. It was a little frightening, especially since one was baring it's teeth at me when I tried to get it off. They kept trying to steal our slurpees, so we went back to the ticket booth and asked the lady there if we could keep our slurpees on the ticket counter. She said yes. 2 seconds after putting them up there a couple of monkeys run up and grab our slurpees and run away with them. So now there's 2 monkeys sitting around drinking slurpees. It was very funny...even though we lost our slurpees. Definitely worth it. See pic. We hung out with the monkeys a little longer until the monkeys started freaking us out. I was honeslty afraid they'd gang up on us and just take us down. We began avoiding eye contact with the monkeys. I ended up hurling my entire bag of peanuts on the ground (I needed to get rid of them before being attacked). One monkey grabbed the bang and took off with it, while a horde of other monkeys chased after him. Honestly, monkeys are scary. They're too smart for my good. I did get one monkey to grab peanuts out of my hand, though. That was cute. He was a nice monkey. We didn't stay long in Lopburi. Then we took a bus back to Bangkok. I got a picture of a monkey sitting on a car. They were all over the town.

Thus concludes the 'I Heart Thailand' series. I'll maybe add some random funny stories later, but the main gist is now layed down here. It was a nice trip. I enjoyed it. Thailand and Thais are awesome. Too bad I really can't say the same thing for Korea.