The Boiling of the Bones

19. Monkey Park

My favorite part of Thailand was the monkey park. On a tip from a group of German tourists I met over coffee at breakfast in a little cafe, I took a bus to Lopburi about an hour north of Bangkok. The city had a big, centrally located park.

It was a typical urban park landscaped with meandering walking trails beneath a thick stand of tall trees overhead. A small concrete wall topped with wrought iron pickets enclosed the space. You might be tempted to think you were in Prague or Budapest with one unique exception. The canopy was filled with monkeys—thousands of them. There were street vendors selling bags of peanuts nearby, so I bought a couple bags and headed into the park to feed the monkeys.

It was unsettling. A thousand sets of eyes glared at me from the treetops. They quickly recognized the white paper bags and began to come down to the ground. Hundreds of monkeys circled around me and began closing in nearer and nearer. There were adorable little babies with their mommas and then bigger, meaner ones that would steal food away from the smaller ones.

I began handing out peanuts and they closed in tighter and tighter around me. One innocent looking little guy standing right beside me reached up and grabbed the hem of my shorts and gave it a few tugs to get my attention. Aww. I gave him a peanut. I threw them to all the cute little ones from whom it was promptly stolen away. I kept trying and they kept getting stolen.

I threw a handful and the little guy in particular I felt sorry for finally got one. I ignored the bigger monkeys, and they didn't appreciate that. One walked boldly right up to me, raised its hands outstretched and suddenly lunged forward baring its teeth and hissing at me like you might yell, boo! --trying to spook or startle someone. It worked. It scared the crap out of me, and I jumped back and, in the process, dropped a bag of peanuts. My tormentor seized the bag from the ground and quickly scrambled away and up into the trees to savor his spoils, no doubt pleased with himself.

I quickly fed a bunch of the bigger guys in case they got any similar ideas. Before long I was out of peanuts. It was amazing how smart they were. As soon as the peanuts were gone, they all began to file off across the grass and back up into the trees.

The next day I hopped on the train again and rode to Saigon, aka, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The scenery along the way was mostly rich green pastureland. Farmers wore straw hats and plowed rice fields with water buffalo.

Saigon was bustling with industry. There were lots of bicycles, scooters and motorbikes buzzing around. I found a little shop willing to rent me a bicycle for a week and I took off exploring the main areas as well as some quaint smaller alleys. I loved how jungle foliage sprang up anywhere there was a spot of unattended open ground.

I recalled images of the fall of Saigon marking the end of the Vietnam War with CIA helicopters evacuating Americans off rooftops as the North Vietnamese army entered the city. I stayed eleven days then pushed on to Hanoi in the north.

The city was similar to Saigon in many ways. It too was a bustling port city along the coast of the South China Sea, positioned on Gulf of Tonkin—another strategic point in the Vietnam War and the Indochina War before that. It had the same tropical, oriental feel with stunning temples. The waterfront along the Red River was beautiful.

Technically Vietnam is still a communist country, but it felt like any other Western capitalist nation. I couldn't understand why such brutal wars were waged here. I couldn't wrap my head around it. It was a place made up of peasants and farmers. There was a spice trade. It's still a supplier of Pepper and Cinnamon. There's some mining and agriculture. Nothing worth a million people losing their lives over. What a waste.

I pushed on by train the following week to Hong Kong. The city was mostly located on Victoria Island rising sharply from the ocean to Victoria Peak. All the skyrise buildings were clustered around the harbor. It had an interesting history as a British colony ironically tracing its beginnings back to the opium trade.