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| Monkey Temple Forest, Ubud |
Knowing my luck (and stellar coordination skills) I expected to get bitten by a dog while running, or at the very least smashed into a coral reef while surfing, or maybe in a motor vehicle accident of some sort while in Indonesia... but attacked by a monkey?!
So, April 2014. It's my last day in Ubud after a spectacular 3 weeks of surfing and snorkeling my way around Indonesia. I decide I want to go to a class at Yoga Barn. On my walk down there I pass the monkey forest sanctuary and decide that for 75 cents I may as well stop in. I avoided the banana sales ladies (I didn't want to attract the dirty little guys to me, just wanted to see the temples and take some pictures). I'd seen the monkeys in action at a few other tourist sites and hikes already, and been warned by people in passing about the monkeys and how the adults were super aggressive, so I was a little wary. Within 100 feet of the entrance I saw a German girl teasing and provoking an adult monkey, and it bit her on the hand! ("Well", I thought, "I'm getting out of here ASAP- and I am definitely not going to mess with them.") Perhaps an omen?
I wandered around a bit aimlessly; there were macaque monkeys everywhere, and someone was filming some sort of documentary television show. The baby monkeys were friendly and at one point I stood next to one and it grabbed my hand and held on tight and we took a selfie together. Ha. I began to warm up to the idea of them.
As I was about to exit I sat down in the shade and started talking to this American couple. A larger monkey was laying down a few meters away on this step and I had my back to it. All of a sudden, a baby monkey ran up from behind and hopped onto my left shoulder. Within literally a split second the large one let out a shrieking war cry and was on me, attacking me on my right shoulder with this crazed look in her eyes. I jumped up and began screaming and trying to knock the large one off, who had her jaw clamped down into my middle deltoid and was not letting go. At the same time I was semi-conscious of the fact that the baby monkey was still happily perched on my other shoulder, watching all of this with amusement. Blood flying and a crowd of bewildered humans closing in to watch the white girl hop around with two monkeys on her, I finally whacked big monkey off but she did this crazy maneuver straight out of the Matrix and came right back at me. I had to kick her a few times since she wouldn't stop! She began charging the couple I had been talking to as well. I finally had a second to gingerly place the baby back on the ground and mama eventually retreated.
Immediately I had searing pain from my neck all the way down my arm. I dumped bottled water on the wounds and headed to the "first aid" office - where a teenage girl splashed something strange on my arm without warning and handed me some band-aids, telling me not to worry. "This happens 4 or 5 times a day, it's ok. We vaccinate all of these (wild) monkeys." Yeah, I'm sure all 605 of them in there line up for their shots each year.
Obviously I was not so convinced, so I headed to the local doctor. She advised me to get tetanus shots and a series of rabies vaccines. Fortunately, because monkey attacks are so common in Ubud, she had a bunch of vaccines on hand, which was good news because 12 hours later I was getting on a plane to Thailand.
If you've never had a rabies vaccine, consider yourself incredibly lucky. I feel like I have a decent pain tolerance.. but the side effects were brutal and lasted 5-7 days after each of the 6 rabies shots I ended up needing over the course of about 4 weeks. Extreme fatigue (as in, could barely get out of bed), intense headaches, sharp pains all over my body, nausea, dizziness, delirium, confusion, insomnia, irritability, restlessness, chills... one of the worst experiences of my life! Didn't help that in the midst of this, I was traveling across the world, meeting my new nephew for the first time, then going back to Utah, selling the rest of my belongings, moving, and two days after my third dose, I ran the Boston Marathon.
Also didn't help that the rabies vaccine is super hard to come by in the US. After days on the phone with people in Utah, I finally tracked down what I needed. My favorite response from clinic, hospital and epidemiological sources besides "you need what?!" was "Holy *%#@, you got bitten by a macaw bird?!!" ("Nope... macaque monkey.")
I was super skittish for about a month after the attack, and still get nightmares. I'm still sometimes startled by dogs that run up to me from behind. I almost punched a house cat in the face a few days after it happened when it jumped off a crate and landed next to me. Ha.
And while I had pain shooting from my neck to hand for about a week after the attack, the skin wounds healed up quickly and the bite scars pale in comparison to the dotting of sand fly scars I have from Colombia in January. Figures.
Apparently my travel insurance plan had some loophole in there for monkey bites.
So, $1800.00 worth of vaccines later... all I have is a bruised ego and an irrational phobia of monkeys! (But.. I'm already planning my next trip to Indonesia) :-)
