🐵 When a Monkey Decides He’s BOSS

👋🏻 Hello, I’m Anna, an adventurer, speaker and author of seven books. Currently slow-travelling the world with my young family, writing about the colour and chaos of a well-lived, unconventional life. 💙 🗺️

Hello Restless Ones,

Thanks so much for all the love and good vibes after last week’s launch of Bedtime Adventure Stories For Grown Ups 2. I’ve had a whale of a time connecting with readers and responding to messages about mad adventure plans being dreamed up.

If you’ve bought the book, thank you! If you have time to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, that would be SHAMAZING.

If you haven’t got a copy yet, or haven’t a clue what I’m talking about — it's here in paperback or eBook, and the audiobook's here.

To this week’s tale…

Let’s go back to Thailand, shall we? And pick up the story where we left off, having found a magical community of world schooling families and everything going swimmingly. Nothing ever stays that way forever, does it?

Read or listen as you prefer and… roll the story!

Anna xx

🐵 When a Monkey Decides He’s BOSS

Everyone loves a furry friend, and I am no exception.

So when we checked into a new two-bedroom apartment we’d booked for the next 3 months, and the receptionist casually mentioned there was a family of monkeys living ‘next door’ — I was more excited than concerned. Being near the local wildlife was all part of Thai life, after all. You saw snakes on hikes, and you lived next door to monkeys.

Our corner apartment was on the first floor. Unlike the pad we’d shared with Nanny Annie, this place backed onto the jungle. It had a two-sided balcony — one part looked out over the pool, the other over a wall and into the trees. We’d been in the apartment for two hours when the neighbours showed up.

‘Kids, look!’ I pointed to a partly-cut-down tree on the other side of the wall. Its flat top made a neat little platform for a monkey to sit on.

The kids rushed onto the balcony, and we watched as a grey, slim-faced female monkey plucked a white flower from between her toes (where else would you keep a snack?) and nibbled on it. She paused momentarily and looked up, a quizzical look on her face.

There was a rustle in a nearby tree, and a baby monkey appeared. ‘Mum!’ Jupiter made a sharp intake of breath. ‘There’s a baby!’ The little monkey nuzzled up to mumma and playfully scrambled onto her back. Mumma, clearly hangry, batted the little one off and went back to her plant-based snack.

‘But where’s the Dadda?’ said Storm, and, as if on cue, a larger primate came prowling along a connecting branch and stopped next to mum and baby. I noticed he stayed standing and didn’t sit down like the other two.

Dadda monkey shifted his gaze toward the balcony, and my stomach did a flip, just a little one. His gaze said, ‘Hi, who are you and don’t mess with my family, okay?’ All in a split second.

So the monkeys stared at us. We stared at them. Mum finished eating her flower and began playing with her little one. Dad skulked off into the bushes.

‘What should we call them?’ I asked, thinking that if we were going to be neighbours, it would be nice to know these monkeys by name.

‘Flower!’ Jupiter said, without hesitation.

‘Okay — which one’s Flower?’

‘The baby,’ she said, with a look that read as ‘duh’.

‘Okay, so the baby is Flower, how about her mum?’

‘Mimi!’ said Storm.

We ran out of naming juice by the time we got to the dad, so we called him ‘Papa’ and moved on.

Over the following week, we got used to seeing the monkeys. We weren’t especially neighbourly in that we didn’t bake them a monkey bundt cake or deliver a chicken casserole to the cut-off tree, but we did smile and say hello whenever we saw them. And I looked forward to watching the monkeys from behind a window each morning, sitting on the sofa with whichever of the kids were awake.

‘Maybe we should feed them?’ Jamie said one morning.

‘Errr no, J.’

‘What? It’d be cool to feed them.’

‘Um, yes, but this is the jungle, not the zoo. And I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that you definitely shouldn’t feed wild monkeys. It messes with the balance of things — they expect food from you.’

I spent the next thirty minutes swotting up on monkey behaviour and specifically on long-tailed macaques. The research confirmed that if you give the monkeys food, they’ll see you as inferior to them. Then they think they’re the boss. And monkey-bosses can get aggressive.

I also learned that macaques are exceptionally clever. Given half a chance, they’ll take food from you, even when it’s not offered, then use intimidation tactics to restate their place in the hierarchy — AKA the boss.

Armed with new knowledge, I was ready to settle in for the long haul with our monkey neighbours. But then, one morning, the monkeys were gone.

For the next ten days we saw nothing of Mimi, Flower or Papa. I missed them and wondered where they’d gotten to. Had they jetted off on holiday? Maybe they’d found an especially delicious banana tree somewhere down the way and were hanging out there instead? I hoped nothing had happened. I hoped they were okay.

And then, suddenly, there was a new monkey in the tree next door.

He seemed younger than Papa, so I pegged him as a monkey-teen and, given that teens like to move in packs, several other boy monkeys soon joined him.

This new primate gang were more entertaining than Mimi, Flower and Papa, but they were also wildly unpredictable. Each morning, they ran amok — dancing along the low wall, leaping onto parasols, scrambling up the balcony of the apartment opposite and even, at one point, attempting to climb onto a Lilo in the pool. They wrestled, yanked one another’s tails and charged around as if their balls had taken over their brains.

A few days later, we were enjoying a family breakfast on the balcony. With the teens in town, I’d taken to doing a pre-breakfast monkey check because there was something about this new gang that made me feel uneasy. The ‘lads’ weren’t around that morning, so we were eating porridge and nuts while the sun rose through the palm trees.

I heard a sharp noise, the sound of scraping claws on metal, and suddenly a monkey was perched on the balcony railing, right in front of us. I nearly pooped my pants and choked on a cashew all at once. Adrenaline shot through my veins — he could be on me or the kids in one easy leap.

‘OK, kids, stay calm and everyone back away slowly. We need to get inside.’

‘Huh? Why? What? Oh!’ Storm saw him first and then the others did too. We ushered everyone backwards and slid the balcony doors shut. I breathed a sigh of relief and then…

‘Oh no.’ I put my head in my hands.

‘What?!’ said Jamie.

‘The nuts.’

We’d left the nuts on the table. I was just wondering whether one of us could rush out and grab the bag when the monkey leapt from the railing to the table and began ripping into the packet with its razor-sharp canines.

‘Oh, crap.’

‘Oh, it’ll be okay. It’s just a few nuts,’ Jamie said.

‘No… it’s not okay. Once they get food, everything changes!’ I said.

The kids crowded at the window, and watched the monkey from behind the safety of the glass, intrigued as he put his face in a bowl of porridge. I was mad at myself — why hadn’t we grabbed the food? But I knew why, we were too busy rushing the kids inside. I was still running through the what-ifs in my head when there was a loud bang!

"Ahhhhh!" Rocky shrieked, stumbling backward as the monkey launched itself from the back of a chair and slammed into the balcony glass — like a pigeon hitting a window mid-flight.

We agreed we couldn’t use the balcony from then on. Even if we thought the monkeys weren’t around, you couldn’t be sure — that boisterous nut-muncher had sprung out of nowhere and we couldn’t take that risk.

‘Okay kids, I’m so sorry, but we can’t go out on the balcony anymore. And we need to keep the doors closed.’ I said, and they all shrugged, seemingly nonplussed.

The following day I left Jamie in the apartment with the kids over lunchtime, while I went to work at the coffee shop next door. Two hours later, I was back. I dropped my bag on the floor, and Jamie came into the living room.

‘Hi, how’d it go?’ I asked, half-distracted, and then I clocked his expression. ‘What, what is it? You’ve got that look on your face that tells me you’ve got big news,’ I said, and he smiled.

‘How did you know?’

‘I just know. Is it good news or bad news?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s too bad. It could be not-so-bad. But it’s not… um, great,’ he said. I thought it was an email he’d got — something to do with work or our house sale back home.

‘Come on then, what is it?’ I asked, and Jamie told the story.

The kids were doing their usual middle-of-the-day chilling in the apartment. Storm was listening to an audiobook on her headphones in the living room. Rocky was playing nearby, and Jamie was in the bedroom reading with Jupiter. Suddenly Jamie heard Rocky yelp. ‘I knew the moment I heard the cry that it was something scary — it was a primal sound,’ he said. Jamie rushed into the living room to find a monkey standing there. The kids had opened the balcony door.

Rocky was over towards the kitchen, but the monkey was standing right next to Storm, who was kneeling on the sofa by the balcony doors, one leg trailing out behind her — completely oblivious to the monkey because she was lost in the audiobook.

Unsure what to do, Jamie gently called to Storm to come towards him and tried to shoo the monkey away. That’s when things took a turn. ‘The monkey put both its hands on Storm’s back leg. He leant over, close to her skin and opened its mouth — I could see its big fang things, I thought it was going to bite her but then, and it was the weirdest thing… it paused, with its mouth open and it looked right at me as if to say, I am going to bite your kid.’

In a gut reflex, Jamie screamed. The monkey dropped Storm’s leg and ran back onto the balcony. The first thing Storm knew about it was feeling something brush her leg, then turning around to see the monkey on the balcony. She hadn’t seen it poised to bite.

Settling from the shock, I told Jamie what I’d read about macaques. About the intimidation tactics. I knew Jamie hadn’t imagined the pause and a threat to bite. That was exactly what it was: a threat.

Crikey. My stomach did a flip. My brain raced. I let out half a laugh, but it was a nervous laugh, I was frightened. One part of me wanted to melt into a puddle of imagined catastrophe. I could tie myself in knots thinking about what might have been. A bite from a monkey. A screaming child in pain. A visit to the clinic for rabies shots.

Instead, I was taking the whole thing as a blessing, a warning. I was so glad I wasn’t there to see it unfold in real time; the image of the monkey with its big teeth so close to Storm’s little leg would play on repeat in my mind. I was grateful for that, at least.

I dreamt about monkeys that night, and so did Jamie. There was a strange feeling, a sense of not being safe. An undercurrent of unease. Even though we’d already paid up front for three months at the apartment, we couldn’t stay.

The building owners were understanding. A husband and wife team who had a family too, they said the monkeys had been a ‘problem’ for the past few months, and I got the feeling we weren’t the first people to move out. They did also offer to ‘sort’ the monkey problem so we could stay, but I wasn’t sure what that meant and I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t resent the monkeys; we were in their habitat. I didn’t want to be a part of any kind of monkey relocation or worse… a cull.

Despite it being high season, the managers agreed to refund us for the stay and move us to a four-bedroom villa with a pool for the next 10 days so that we had some grace in finding a new place to live.

Much as it was going to be a faff to pack everything up again and lift and shift us all to a new home, I had to laugh at the wonder of the universe. If the worst-case scenario wound up with us in an MTV Cribs-style villa, then maybe it was all one big ruse. Maybe Mimi, Papa and Flower had gone off to hatch a plan and sent the boys back to execute it. Maybe the monkeys had been on our side all along?

My New Book is out: Bedtime Adventure Stories for Grown Ups 2 — True travel stories about freedom, family chaos and escaping the everyday.

💻 eBook here | 📕 Paperback here |

🎧 Audiobook here