Monkey Business

by Yannik Liebmann (Germany)

I didn't expect to find Indonesia

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Let me pick you up and quickly set the scene: In 2015, I studied on Bali for three months and lived in a villa together with two friends of mine – one male, one female. Easy to say that I was living a dream. Another friend of ours – female – did an internship in Malaysia at the same time and came to visit us for a week. Together with the two ladies, I decided to go relax at Green Bowl Beach in the south of Bali. In order to get to the beach, you must park your scooter at a parking station next to an old temple, which nowadays has new inhabitants – monkeys. From there you take about 200-300 steps down to that beautiful golden beach. Usually, the monkeys stay in their temple and avoid the beach, so that I didn’t expect to find a monkey down there. However, this day, it was different. One monkey was down at the beach, strolling around and trying to play tricks on visitors. Visitors just like us. We laid down our towels in the sand and decided to have a little swim. Just before I entered the water, I luckily noticed that I still had my mobile phone in the pocket of my trousers, so I headed back to see the monkey already investigating our bags. Brave me thought to intimidate the intruder by implying to beat him with one of my flip flops. I had some respect though. Which the monkey apparently noticed, so that he got up and started “flexing” and showing his teeth. At this moment, I realized that this cute tiny monkey was almost as a tall as me (I am not that much of a tall guy) and seemed quite self-confident. While thinking that, he made his first attempts in trying to bite and scratch me, but I could defend myself with my flip flop. The ladies were chilling and cheering from the water by the way. After a couple of courageous self-defense attempts, an Australian guy went to help me. At least he tried. By throwing sand at the monkey. He was not very successful and hit me more often than the monkey. It was a tough fight, until at a certain point, a Balinese woman came helping out with a stick, implying to beat the monkey. This implication must’ve seemed a little more serious than my previous attempt, so that the monkey left. As a result, the woman persisted on me having to thank her by buying some of her beautiful selfmade jewellery. A chain with a white, damaged clam. Bought it, made her happy, bought the stick as well for some more ninja-like self-defense. The monkey actually came back a couple of times, but I was able to defend ourselves. Finally, we found out why our bags raised his attention in the first place. One of the ladies was grocery-shopping at a supermarket before going to the beach, and had the groceries still in a white plastic bag, which was visible through her rucksack. Background info: Over the time, the monkeys learned that white plastic bags meant groceries, which meant food for them, which meant go for it, no matter what! Nowadays, when people ask me what is the most unusual thing that happened to me during my studies on Bali, I never have to think of an answer: I fought with a wild monkey at a beach over some packages of Cheetos. True story!