Zoo and Monkey Attacks

The Zoo

Today the Cambodia internship group and Jessie (a lovely member from the ward) took a trip to the zoo, which is located outside the city of Phnom Penh. Initially I was a little skeptical about this trip because I have had the worst luck at zoos. Without fail, I see 3-4 animals at the zoo. The rest are both sleeping and hidden behind shrubbery or they are not in their exhibit. However, I was optimistic that this would be different because zoos abroad tend to have more animals.

So, at 10 am the entire group me at the church and piled into a van. After an hour of talking, driving through dirt roads, and getting stuck in traffic we arrived at the dirt road that led up to the zoo. As we drove up this dirt path, you could see at least 20 individuals standing on the side of the road. In only took me a few seconds to realize that these individuals were elderly and begging for money. Unfortunately, there was no possibility of us stopping to give them money. After all, if you give one beggar money, then it is expected of you to give the others money as well. As we drove by these elderly beggars, you could tell that it had been a couple days since he or she has had a substantial meal. One of these days I am going to pack some nutritious treats to hand out to beggars.

After another 20 minutes, we arrived at the ticket booth and entered the establishment. Unlike Western zoos, this zoo did not have a nice parking lot and a paved walkway that would lead you to animal exhibits. In this zoo, there were 4 different sections that you could walk, drive, or ride a tuk tuk to. The first section was the monkey and deer exhibit, which literally is an open area with a bunch of wild monkeys and deer. People will follow you around and try to sell you potatoes and bananas to feed the animals. Of course I bought some because what are the chances you will get to feed monkeys and deer in the US? Slim. At first the monkeys and deer were very cute, they would walk up to me and gently grab the food out of my hands. 

Well, after about 10 minutes the monkeys and deer got overly excited and hungry. They started snatching the potatoes and bananas when we were not looking. It was not long before the vicious monkeys and deer found out about the food we were handing out. One of the vicious monkeys had a cleft lip and a reputation for biting. It is safe to say that we dropped a lot of our food and made a quick escape out of the exhibit.

The rest of the zoo was not that exciting. The most noteworthy experiences happened to Beau, the facilitator from BYU, who was attacked twice by two different monkeys. One of the attacks happened while he was standing by a monkey cage, the other happened while he was trying to hand a monkey a potato. I tried to convince him to touch another monkey...after all, the third try is the successful one, right?