Cows, Pigs & Human Dung: A Story of Monkeys

Monday, 1 February 2016

A Story of Monkeys

Whoa! Is this the entrance to a Haunted House in a Carnival? Nope, it’s actually the entrance to the Golden Temple of Dambulla, in Sri Lanka

It’s gonna be the Monkey Year in exactly a week's time! Excited!! For reunion dinner, we’ll probably have a lovely home-cooked meal of rice, curry chicken or mutton (hope it ain’t fish), some fabulous sambal, maybe steamed eggs Chinese-style, some green vegetables, etc …just like any other day of the year! (What? It ain’t even a holiday here in the UAE, OK?) We’ll dig up some new clothes to wear (I’m sure we have some hidden away somewhere), or we’ll find some clothes we’ve not worn for ages and pretend they’re new clothes. I’ll pack some money into red packets to give to the kids. (I think I still have some red packets left over from the Year of the Horse! Who’ll care? Justin doesn’t even know what animal year it is! Besides, it’ll be thrown away as soon as he gets his hands into that cash…)

OK kidding aside, the missus and I are thinking of catching a movie in the cinemas, minus Justin (he’ll be schooling hehe!) Me? Well, that’s the beauty of working for a Chinese Company! I think (judging from past year practices) our Company will give us at least one day off, despite it being a working day in the entire friggin Middle East, and the regions beyond. That’s the only time we can catch an 18/adult-rated movie, but …with Jayden around now, I doubt we’ll have that liberty… (yeah, the cinemas here apply movie ratings to even infants whose only knowledge are the teats of their mommy!) And that’s our CNY plan! Nice huh?

Dambulla Cave Temple, Sri Lanka

For the blog, I’ve decided to do a story on monkeys (it’s the Monkey Year after all). Here are pictures of Dambulla, in Sri Lanka. Dambulla is the site of a famous Buddhist cave temple. The pictures are from my second visit with Anu and Justin. On my first visit in 2004, this place was teeming with monkeys. On that particular visit, I, my brother and my friend, Wai Yen had the total of 2 days and a night to see the entire friggin country of Sri Lanka. It was a stopover for their return flight to Malaysia from India via SriLankan Airlines. They had visited me in India. I decided to join them for a visit to Sri Lanka (heck, I was single, and ready to see any country on a whim!)

Anyway, to cut the story short, we hired a car from Bandaranaike Airport (Colombo’s International Airport) to take us to as many places as possible within that limited time. We arrived at the airport at 4 friggin am, and Jason and Wai Yen had to fly out to Malaysia on the next evening. (I had an extra night in Colombo). The driver we engaged through a tourist booth at the airport was an ‘expert’ tourist guide. Expert or not, he also happened to be the only driver around at that time. Hell, what choice do you think we have, at 4am? (OK, there may be more if you wait, and visit a few more tourist booths with bleary-eyed staff). Sri Lanka was still technically at war, so it felt like the soldiers with machine guns outnumber tourist arrivals.

Our first stop in our whirlwind tour was Dambulla. A few hours after we started, our expert driver suddenly stopped at a road side by a hill and said, “there up that staircase”. Huh? “Yeah that staircase, and no shoes!” So we kept our shoes in the car, and started walking barefoot up the stone steps. It was a really peaceful walk, through rocks and trees, and stepping on sharp bloody stones and twigs, and monkey poo, (must have been that, coz monkeys were all over the place). Didn’t strike us strange that we were about the only ones on the steps. Not long after, we reached a clearing and there it was, the temple. Now, here were a lot more people than we thought there’d be, and they had shoes on! (It turned out that our ‘expert’ driver dropped us at a side entrance). The main entrance is a much shorter walk, and shoes could be worn right up to the entrance of the temple area! (Maybe the driver did that to save us the entrance fee… Was there an entrance fee?? …Honestly, you think I’d remember?) And we had to walk all the way down again!! But it sure saved us some money (in the form of reduced tips for our brilliant driver).

One of the most memorable things of our 2004 visit, was the antics of two monkeys in the courtyard in front of the main temple. We and a lot of visitors – families, kids, old folks, camera-toting tourists, etc were hanging around, in front of a fish pond, when two amorous monkeys went at it, doggy-style, with full expression and sound, in the middle of the friggin courtyard. The adults laughed (most of us anyway), the kids just looked on and wondered what the heck the monkeys were doing. The male monkey looked at us, bared his teeth and shrieked while banging his partner for the world to see. What a sight!

This was where the monkeys went at it in 2004 – Courtyard in front of the Dambulla Cave Temple. Here’s a view of the pond by the courtyard.

But I liked the temple on the whole. That’s why I brought Anu and Justin here. There were a lot less monkeys in 2013, and none inside the temple compound. 9 years, and the end of war meant a lot of difference I guess, or the temple officials must’ve finally gotten enough of the daily X-rated drama unfolding at their doorsteps!