Monkeys are probably my least favorite animals: creepy little fellows that steal, bite and crap all over (how an animal supposedly intelligent has so little ability to control its bowel movements is beyond me).
Granted, monkeys belong in the wild.. which bears the question ; what is wild? Take the monkeys (common lesser macaques) of Wat Phmon: mean, fat ,big monsters that are wild in as far as that they can go wherever they want to go, and do whatever they want to do, even leave phnom penh should they be so inclined. They are not so inclined, and no matter how we view them, they certainly do not view themselves as` nature's wild children in the jungle sense. They happily terrorize the entire neighborhood around the temple: attack little old ladies on pilgrimage, steal tourists cameras and bite children, break and enter into the surounding houses to ransack interiors and defecate on beds; should one dare to interrupt on gets attacked and severely bitten if not worse.. the monkeys disengage the pipes from water tanks, drinks their fill and leave while the entire building gets flooded by the slowly emptying tank.,they pelt pedestrians with mangoes and debris and so on. Every few years the police -(protests by WWI non withstanding- everybody else thinks that it is a good idea)- the police shoots the worst offenders: gangster monkeys they call them- but within weeks a few new leading monkeys will have emerged and the terror begins again...
long suffering friends who live in the neighborhood visited our outpost a few weeks ago. When I asked about the wat phnom monkeys, they sighed and said they are even worse. If you can believe it: see, phnom penh's youth have taken to sniffing glue around wat phnom,when sufficiently stoned they wander off and leave their paraphernalia behind. And well monkey see, monkey do, now the monkeys have taken to sniffing glue too and are all stoned out of their monkey sculls ....
