I don’t know much about monkeys. In fact, pretty much all I know is that our predecessors are supposed to be somehow related to their predecessors. And, to be honest, I’m not even sure whether I got that bit right. Still, I like to look upon them as distant relatives; creatures that we should be able to find some common ground with. I get on well with my cats and my dog, so I figured if I ever came across a gang of monkeys it would be a walk in the park.

Well, in Bali, in Alas Kedaton, to be precise, I did come across a gang of monkeys. There were monkeys everywhere. As we drove into the car park of the monkey-filled attraction we saw monkeys hanging from trees, monkeys chasing each other from branch to branch, monkeys making themselves at home on car bonnets, monkeys eating lychees from the ground, even one poor female monkey being victim of monkey rape. There was monkey energy radiating from every corner of the car park. Humans looked on, partly in fear of what these unpredictable distant cousins were going to do next, partly perplexed by the fact that we are supposed to have something in common with these things. This place was like nowhere I had been before. Here, the monkeys were in control.

We paid the entrance fee (Rp. 50,000 ≈ 4€) into the attraction – what we had seen before was just the car park action – and were accompanied by a guide, who kindly carried the nuts that we had bought and consequently spent the next half hour batting wannabe monkey thieves away from the prized food. She asked if we wanted to feed a monkey. We noticed that they were following us around, eyeing us up as we walked, trying to decide how easily they could get food from us. We decided we might as well give it ago. The guide gave me some nuts and told me to kneel down and hold my hand out. Sure enough, within seconds of me taking the nuts, a reasonably polite monkey came over, grabbed onto my shorts and took the nuts from my hand. If it had been able to speak, I reckon it would have said “thank you”. As we walked on, we got braver in our feeding. The height of our daring was to stand before a wall and let the guide hold a nut in front of our shoulder. At this point a monkey would come bounding from the wall onto our shoulder where it would receive the nut. The monkey nearest, or perhaps brave enough to breach my shoulder, was apparently the largest monkey in the whole forest. I didn’t know this at the time, I was too busy focusing on pretending I was enjoying the experience and smiling at the camera. What I did know was that the thing on my shoulder was really quite heavy and, more to the point, a monkey.

The rest of the tour was pretty tame in comparison. We saw some giant bats hanging from trees. They would probably have scared the hell out of me had I seen them close up but from our distance they just looked like they might be big and scary and that was okay for me. We saw lots more monkeys, walking the paths, sitting on a fence that had been freshly painted, being chased away by stall owners trying to make a living. By the time we left the place I was monkeyed up and happy to have decided to stick to cats and dogs in the future.