The (Mis)Adventures of Matt Lyon

OK so its been a while since I've emailed and a lot has happened. So, where'd I leave off? Bangkok. Right. Wow, that was a lifetime ago. So we never went to the Thai island, opting instead to head north and stop at a few places along the way. First stop was Ayutthaya. About 100km north of the capital, Ayutthaya boasts stunning Khmer-style ruins and an amazing inner-island. The city is well over 600 years old and was the seat of the Siamese for a good long while. Anyway, Meghan and I took a bus there and met a Belgian couple along the way. We spent the evening together taking a boat tour of the city, and stopping at ruins and temples (wats). The night market was our disembarkation point and a tasty Padthai was fried up for about 60 cents. Noodles, veggies. Sprouts, Nuts. Yum. Meghan and I rented bikes the next day and toured the city. Sweltering heat, but no matter, we're fresh packers and can handle a little perspiration.

The next day we got to the train station to head for Lopburi. 13 Baht for a 90 minute train ride. That is 35 cents, people. We were so proud of our travel prowess until the train rolled up overflowing with human flesh. Hot, sticky, grabby, dirty human flesh! But not the sexy kind. The kind that is trying to sell dried fish and lukewarm soda to the heaping masses. It was a long hour and a half to say the least.

But we successfully made our way to Lopburi, the land of monkeys! Hot, sticky, grabby, dirty monkeys! And what a relief they were! As legend goes, a band of monkeys came in from the surrounding forest and set up shop in some temple ruins. Then they mated. And they mated some more. More mating occurred. Probably some buttscratching/sniffing to break up the monotony. Then back to the coitus! After a few generations of hot libido action, there were nearly more monkeys than people. And the people, being good Buddhists, couldn't bring themselves to killing the buggers off. So, they basically gave them the block of the city containing the ruins. You pay about 50 cents to get into the temple area and are immediately overwhelmed by an attack from air and land. Big and small macaques barraging you from all directions, using all their limbs to climb all your limbs for no other seeming purpose than to eat your hair. Cute! And getting them off is a world of pain. Swinging wildly is an understated way of describing my actions. Somehow, these flea-biters just think I've become a living merry-go-round, and as soon as I've flung one off, 2 have jumped back on. At first I felt bad for the babies. But after a few harried minutes of this monkey business, I was using the smaller ones as cannon fodder for the more pugnacious among the aggressors. A lessor soul might have been more craven, and alas, many a Chinese girl was humbled and humiliated that day, but I: I, my friends, showed the monkey a thing or two about what it is to be a Lyon. By the end of it, I was using butt munchers as javelins. I took home the gold for Monkey Toss.

What is that saying about "If you give a mouse a cookie?" Well, if you give a monkey a temple, it will want a city. The temple has the majority of the monkeys, but the surrounding city blocks are also crawling with simians. They hang from the power lines like urban vines. They inhabit rooftops like treetops. They use phone booths to make mating calls. They even wait for cars to stop to cross the street like....well there's no real jungle analogy for that, is there? They cross the street like flipping pedestrians! We have pictures to prove it!

After we'd had our fill of monkeying around, we soaked up some internet rays, then headed to the night market for grub and our first of many encounters with urban elephants. Just walking around, eating bananas out of tourists' hands. Master in tow, of course.
Well, Lopburi was merely an action-packed day stop and that evening, we hopped an overnight train to Chiang Mai, the capital of Thailand's North.

# posted by Matt Lyon @ 8:00 PM