Stig goes to Monkey town

So I left Kanchanburi with a local bus heading for Supanburi, and then for Lopburi - the monkey town!
This is one of the oldest city in Thailand with a lot of ancient ruins. But ruins you can find everywhere in Thailand, what makes this city special is the monkeys !
It is a 2 hour trip that took me 5,5 hours.....not the best idea to take the local buses..... It is driving in 50 Km/h the whole way and stopping every 500 meters to let people on or off, as there is no bus stops anywhere.
I got to know some thai people at least, as i was a pretty confused tourist in need of guidance....
The guy i met was something as arch-traditional as a rice picker. I asked him if i could come with him one day and pick some rice, that would have been a pretty genuine experience, but unfortunately his english was too bad for us to communicate except for sign language.

My first impression of the city was that it was a dirty, boring small town. When i came to the place in town where the monkeys where I instantly felt that it was really worth going here !
I stayed at the Lopburi city hotel just because all the monkeys seem to enjoy jumping around there, but in retrospective i would rather have stayed at the Noom Guesthouse, as it is a much better atmospherere there as well as beeing the only place in town to meet other travellers or foreigners living in Lopburi.

It was just one of the most absurd things I have seen in my life with all the monkeys jumping around in the middle of the city. There were thousands and thousands of them, obviously copulating freely(as i witnessed a few times in the middle of the trafficed road!).

The monkeys are simply just so much fun watching, i could easily spend a whole day just watching them go about their lives, and so i did.
They are quite smart creatures, they even had a funeral ceremony when one of the monkeys was fried in the electrical cables all the other monkeys picked him up and carried him to his last resting place..
The monkeys were pretty raunchy, liked to jump up on my backpack and run up my legs. They were also stealing my drinks and food!

The Lopburi city zoo was however the most HORRIFIC sight i've seen. My god! there was no other tourists here, only locals. The cost to get in was a pityful 20 Baht, and so the maintenance was accordingly.
The gorillas' were kept in a small 10*10 meter cemented room all day.

40 C hot, they had no water or food available,nothing to play with, and the cage was dirty and mouldy. The poor creautures are so amazingly smart that one can easily see the suffering in their eyes when they were clinging to the bars of the cage. He was even reaching for my water bottle, obviously quite thirsty in the hot weather.
It was not entertaining. about the level of entertainment as going to a concentration camp. Stay away from this place!

On  the Noom guesthouse i spent most my days when i was'nt playing with the monkeys. Here I met 3 typical 50 year old brittish guys with 20 year old thai girlfriends, Nice....not... and i met a very friendly dutch girl who was about to go further north. . One of the girlfriend was so obviously flirting with me in some desperate hope that i should get together with her instead of that fat old man.

..
They were pretty much just sitting around drinking beer all day, and one of them was like escaping some prison sentence or something..
So in the evening we went to the local club. 

The thai club is just the craziest club i've ever seen. Live thai music all night,and everybody dancing like crazy around the tables. No people in the whole club were drunk, all of them drinking some nasty thai drink that taste like whisky. I got a lot more attention then what I am used to, and a lot more then i really want....as a result of beeing the only no-thai person in the whole place (the other guys went home).
All the guys were letting me in their little dance circles and all of them offering me this drink. I must have been drinking from 20 different glasses that night, as no one would take no for an answer.

Another thing wich was pretty strange was the guys all trying to hook me up with every girl in the place...he was just pointing at all different girls and like " wich one do you want?". I just kept dancing with these guys, trying not to give any attention to all these girls, I just wondered why he could'nt go for them himself instead of offering them to me.
Pimp and prostitute? no ,that was'nt the case.... i can't imagine that every girl in this club was a prostitute and every guy a pimp....It must just be some kind of custom to offer foreigners girls or something..
I've never had that many girls in one night trying to hit on me.It was preeetty bad,so I eventually left.
So that was my first evening in a non-tourist town in a local club. Pretty crazy.