‘Life-altering’ can mean many things

The two Thai students seemed to be serious. My girlfriend and I had been speaking to them for roughly thirty minutes after they approached us on the train to practice their English and in all that time, they never once indicated they had evil intentions.

“You should stop at Lopburi,” one of them said and the other agreed. “It’s wonderful. There are many old temples there, and the monks put on feasts for the monkeys. It’s pristine, and beautiful, one of Thailand’s most popular tourist attractions.”

We weren’t destined to arrive in Chiang Mai in the north till the next day and their description of this one-thousand-year-old town sounded inviting. We spontaneously decided to take their advice, leaping from the train and waving our compatriots goodbye, while they smiled at us through the window like two people who hadn’t just sentenced strangers to the Thunderdome.

As we exited the train station, the town’s famous crab-eating macaques were waiting for us. Large grey monkeys, they perched on the rooftops glowering down at us like we were the new dusty strangers walking through the swing doors of an old west saloon. Our small group of new tourists huddled together, and channelled by the crowds out onto the street had just become fair game for these malevolent gargoyles. Within a minute, one woman had a pair of sunglasses snatched off her head by a shaggy male, who had leapt from his rooftop, grabbed his prize and disappeared up the side of a building before his victim had a chance to scream. No sooner had he done that, than the monkeys made it clear most of them weren’t here for theft, but rather to treat the tourists like mobile portaloos. The gauntlet had begun.

Picture, if you can, an airport duty-free where beautiful women calmly attempt to spray passersby with perfume samples – only in this instance they aren’t women, they are malevolent monkeys; no one is calm; and instead of perfume, they are spraying you with rivers of urine from the tops of buildings.

And don’t think for one second that the macaques were doing this casually either. As people started running, desperate to escape the streams of pinpoint-accurate wee, the troops of monkeys started bounding across the rooftops to reach the next street corner where they knew they could head their victims off. This was their town, they knew every street, every corner, and every elevation and they were using it to their advantage to rain down various excretions on the unfortunate tourists below.

It was like Pamplona’s running of the bulls, but instead of potentially suffering a heroic death impaled on a set of horns, you are trying to avoid a sad shower and a shame-filled trip to the laundromat.

Watching the locals, my girlfriend and I kept calm and stood under the eaves in the doorway of a small shop while a chaotic stampede of leather flip-flops, sarongs, and tie-dyed shirts screamed its way up and down the street. As things died down, and the wails of terror grew distant, we dared to step out into the road, and immediately headed to a dark, run-down hotel where we spread our towels out on the bedsheets for fear of diseases and spent a restless night listening to our neighbours loudly watch CNN.

In the end, we got on the train north without bothering with the temples and the monkey feedings. We didn’t need to. Lopburi had already given us all we needed. If you think travel isn’t life-altering then you definitely haven’t seen a monkey, perched on a rain gutter, gleefully take a poo on an American tourist.

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