Monkeys in Angkor Wat

On the first day in Cambodia we went to the ruins. We noticed monkeys on our way up. There were a lot of them in one place. It was like a pack. Mom asked to stop the tuk tuk to take some pictures of them. Once we took the pictures we drove on. On the last day, mom promised me we could stop by the monkeys. So we did. This time they were in a different place. They were by the main temple, Angkor Wat, by the river.

We asked the tuk tuk driver to stop, so he did. We got out by two monkeys. Almost immediately a monkey walked over to Dad, jumped up on him and started grooming his hair. All of us were too busy laughing when the monkey reached over and grabbed Dad’s sunglasses off his face. For a while he sat there on Dad’s shoulders. Bjorn tried to reach over and grab the sunglasses from the monkey. But the monkey jumped off and ran over a distance from Dad and started sucking on the sunglasses.

No tasty bugs here.

Hmmm.... what's this?

Dad asked for them back, but that didn’t work. Then Dad started rummaging around in his pocket to find something to exchange with the monkey for his sunglasses. The first thing Dad found that wasn’t important was some chap stick that was almost empty. He walked up to the monkey and pulled the sunglasses from his mouth and threw the chap stick at him. The monkey had a hard time leaving the sunglasses after grabbing on to dad’s leg while he was taking it; but soon found that the chap stick looked edible enough and started eating the remains of it.

Bjorn and I went over to look at a dead mouse with ants all over it when the monkey realized that the chap stick didn’t taste very good, and whatever we were looking at must be more interesting. When he started walking over Bjorn and I moved over towards Mom and Dad worried that he would steal something from us. He looked at the mouse, then looked up at us with a mad face.

So we went over to look at some mama monkeys and their babies. The babies were really cute. They must have just been born because they were stumbling around and were very clumsy. While we were standing there watching the monkeys a lady on a motorcycle drove up selling fruits. She had a bag of corn on her motorcycle handle and one of the monkeys came up and ripped the corn out of its bag.

On our way back we noticed there were some monkeys in our tuk tuk. When we came up one was sitting on one of the seats licking an empty sprite can. We stood there for a while then shooed him off. Then we got in the tuk tuk and drove back to the place.

A monkey inspecting a Sprite can.

-Emma