So once I thought the Bali adaptation fase was slightly over and that after a month and a half of living in contact with Nature and its wilderness more or less in harmony, something completely unexpected happened this morning.
But before I am going to make a little list of a few creatures that I have seen in my home so you can understand how my degree of immunity to hysteria has been slowly becoming stabilized as days go by (remember I now live in an open living):
- I see very black and shiny excrements of an animal about half the size of my pinky that are always found in the same spot, day after day. I have been told by a local they belong to a “tuke” which I presume it’s the green 30cms long gecko I see in the ceiling of my studio room (sometimes there are up to 3)
- I have seen many toads in the pond where the fish are, and even going up the stairs to the bedrooms. When I stare of them closely (I find them playful and cute), they freeze and play dead. There is hidden corner in the kitchen floor where I usually see have a dozen of them piled up resting or hiding
- While in my bed, I had been hearing for 3 days fast little feet run from one side to the other in the floor above. Alex finally found a huge rat stuck in the sticky pad trap and had to bring it do the garden in the middle of the night to liberate the poor animal
- I have seen a mouse swimming in the fish pond
- I have been taking out the floating dead corpse of 14 fish covered with tadpoles that were slowly dying in our fish pond due to an intoxication
- I have seen huge flying bees, giant mosquitoes, a gigantic Napoleon Beetle right next to a round balled switch light ready for my confussion, my hand soap bar gnawed by who knows what, poo in my kitchen table, flying bats in my room…
But, this morning at 6am I had my younger son León come running to my room all giggly saying that there was a monkey in his room. I did hear some noise of something landing in the noisy wood floor, but I could never expect this. My husband Alex was not in the house since he is doing a Panchakarma, so I was alone with the kids, being a yelling hysterical woman and at the same time a brave “I have it under control” manly behaved man.
So I ran and found the huge male macaque passing right in front of me like if we weren’t even there and going into the studio (I thought he would steal my Mac equipment or anything else he would find in his way). And then our apparently fierceless greyhound appeared and became very fierce territorial and they started to confront the primate until they started a fight! Oh boy were those big teeth! And big other things that he had hanging! That is when a mix of a woman and a man came in handy since the yelling distracted them and stopped the fight and the firm command of my hand pointing down the stairs to my dog worked. But the macaque still was acting cool. Walked through my room, went out the terrace, went inside the bath, climbed up a bamboo pole and crawled up the palm leaved roof to go to the 3rd of 4th floor. We became excited and curiosity made us go upstairs running. We went to the “mirador” and there he was, eating a small papaya completely ignoring us. He even enjoyed the view, changing from one side to the other, giving us his back while looking down to the Nyuh Kuning houses.
For a moment I thought I was the worst mom in the world, but then I thought the moment was priceless and that something incredibly magical had just happened to us. The guy got tired of us boring staring humans and decided to slide down the roof again and go back to our terrace, enter our room and go down the stairs.
Then I started to see the guards of the Spa Villas next door looking at him and pointing him out to me, he was in the land right next door doing his Monkey Business stealing some young papayas from the farmer. Then, what else can I expect by living 300 meters apart from the Sacred Monkey Forest in Ubud? These monkeys living in the perimeters are the ones that have been kicked out from there because they have not been accepted by the gang. Usually they are more aggressive males. So besides the fact I was scared for its size, I tried to keep it cool understanding this is their natural habitat.
So what I have I learned with this:
- Never show your teeth or look directly in the monkey’s eyes, then the relationship with our quirky cousins will be gentle and respectful enough
- Yes, I have moved to Bali, and I think this incident suddenly made the idea ground. It slapped me in the face!
- And finally, “Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town” (George Carlin). So let’s not get too confident here… They will show up again, walk in my home regardlessly but maybe next time I will ask him to come and sit down with us for breakfast or even better, ask him to make our scrambled eggs and bacon!
Thank you dear human-monkey God Hanuman for making this incident happen in a magical, mystical and peaceful manner!
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