After Saigon and Hanoi, we headed to Malaysia. We were staying at a super nice resort. One much nicer than we usually stay at. On the way from the airport to the hotel, we saw a man feeding monkeys on the side of the road. We were all like…
We were early for check-in so we had lunch. Then headed to our room. We had to take a golf cart everywhere. It was a huge resort. In order to all be in a connecting room, we were staying in a jungle house and not right on the water. All is totally fine.
We noticed there was a sign on the door reminding you to lock the doors so the monkeys don’t get in. We saw mom standing outside and come in and leave the door open. We say to her that we don’t know what the monkey situation is like so she should shut the door.
Then, we were decompressing about our travel day (first real scare day of Coronavirus) and sitting on the deck. When, mom said “oh, there’s a monkey…” and then all of a sudden, they descended on us. There were so many of them. We ran inside and shut the door. But didn’t take anything inside with us that we had outside. They ransacked the place. They even lifted the cushions to see if anything with underneath.
They then ran to the other deck and were trying to slide the door open. Later, mom was looking outside and left the door open AGAIN. We had a serious chat with her at this point about not leaving the door open. I literally said...to my mom..."YOU KNOW I'M JUST WORRIED ABOUT YOU DYING AND GETTING YOUR FACE EATEN OFF, I NEED YOU TO STOP LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN OR GOING OUTSIDE ALONE." We were at that point.
When we were on the golf cart back to the lobby, we mentioned our room number and said something about monkeys. The guy laughed. But in a knowing way. We shrugged it off.
The following day, we took at mangrove tour. It was beautiful! We went through a bat cave, which was terrifying. Like an actual 20,000 bats sleeping above you on the ceiling of the cave and you walk underneath them. Mom grabbed Denise’ hand and I had Leslie on my back, essentially.
However, the monkeys were the scary part of the trip. We got into a water cave and came to the other side where there were loads of monkeys. There was clearly just a fight because one of the monkeys had a huge gash on his back. He kept reaching back and tenderly touching it. The other monkeys kept surrounding him and screeching at him. We found out that day that monkeys can swim.
The next day we took a private boat tour…this is where things went off course.