June 30th, 2019
🐒 🐒 🐒 June 30th, 2019
The world is being overtaken by monkeys (or so it would seem).
I had my usual 3:45 awakening, but today I persisted and was able to fall back asleep until almost 7am! I (nor my travel companion) didn’t feel like moving too too fast this morning but I was able to get myself to coffee by 9am. Can’t quite imagine starting the day without that black instant coffee. 🤣🤣 there is a lovely sitting area out front that has some tables and chairs with a remarkable view of the ocean.
So after enjoying that for a while around 12:30, Troy and I decided to go get a massage! Wait! That’s not entirely true. I asked Lek where to get laundry done and I dropped laundry off for washing. (20Baht ~70 cents for a load) . THEN we went for a massage. I had a head, shoulders and back massage and Troy got a thai massage for 200 baht each. It was really quite good and no ladyboys were involved. Haven’t seen any here to be honest. I think we are too far away from a larger center for that now.
After the massage we decided to have some lunch! We hit up a restaurant that looked promising down the street from our hotel called The Top View. I ordered a screw driver and got boozy Tang, Troy had a margarita, I think it was ok. Some spring rolls and wings later, we were satisfied.
Then it was time to go see a local site. There is a hill/mountain on the south end of town that has a stunning 360 degree view of town, ocean etc apparently. There’s nothing we love more than a stunning view! So to the top of Wat Thamikaran Worawihan (The Monkey Temple) we go. All 418 steps…..We had been warned that there were a lot of monkeys and that said monkeys are very bold. We shouldn’t have loose sunglasses, phones or anything enticing in our hands or on our person. And in fact one person told us to take bananas to use as bartering chips to get our stuff back in case they got a hold of anything. We decided to batten down the hatches and just go ahead without bananas. Indeed there were a lot of monkeys, adults right down to tiny babies and it was very fun to see their little nuclear families. They were taking care of each other, cleaning each other and meeting each other’s needs (let’s just leave the details at that! 😉). Nature is what it is!! Lots of monkey poop all over the place too! Full time work for the Monk at the top sweeping up the poop.
For the most part the monkeys just jumped around us and kept an eye on us. We didn’t have much that interested them. One little one tried to pull a jewel off my flip flop. But it was a half hearted attempt at best.
The view was indeed spectacular and the best part was the breeze that we enjoyed when up at the top!
After coming back down and hitting the 7-11 across the street for water and ice cream, we were now of MUCH interest to the monkeys. Apparently monkeys like ice cream?? We outsmarted them and dodged our way down another street making our way back to the hotel (and more importantly, the hotel pool). I had to be hard core talked into getting dressed to go back out for supper but was glad I did bcz we found a small street market on the street behind us with a burger vendor. For 130 baht ($4.25 usd) we got a homemade burger grilled right in front of us with bacon, cheese, tomato, lettuce and sauce.
I may also have gotten a couple pork skewers, a pineapple shake and some coconut pancakes! Love the street food here!
