No Touch Monkey!: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late
by Ayun Halliday
Overview
From the Publisher
Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the zaniest, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe. Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall.
My thoughts
If you want a travel essay with shock value, you've come to the right author. Ayun Halliday has had more than her fair share of travel catastrophes as she's traveled the world on a budget that would keep me home. She doesn't mind foregoing the simple pleasure of personal hygiene, nor does she worry too much about where her next meal will come from. She readily trusts strangers to help her out of a jam and to my amazement, often it works. To her credit, when it doesn't she's far from bitter. Although she is currently married with children, she has several travel partners throughout the book.
The first couple of stories she told left me with my mouth hanging open. Someone actually survived the ordeal and lived to tell about it without being resentful! Amazing! Shortly thereafter the peculiar turned gross, the gross turned illegal, the illegal lost its humor, and I couldn't wait to put this book back on the shelf.
I didn't hate the book by any means but reading about buying pot from strangers in far away lands and the drug-induced follies that ensued is not my kind of entertainment. Halliday is a clever and gifted writer. My guess is that she has better stories to tell than she chose to put in this book.
Favorite Passage
The best part was not written by the author. The best part is the sign she found in Ubud, Bali that read:
FOR YOUR ENJOYMEN AND SAFETY PLEASE OBSERVE THE FOLLOWING INDIKATION!
Do not touch or tease the monkey as the may react with unprediktable manners.
Forbidden fed to the monkeys, supposing you have soom food for them. Please leave to our monkey's expert.
If there is no monkeys expert with you toss the food to them from a save distance.
Do not hide food on you. They will find it, even if it is in your pocket or a bag.
Never grab a monkey. If a monkey gets on you, drop all your food and walk a way until it jumps off.
We Trust Your Visit Will Be Memorable One.
That's the writing that drew me in. The following is the stuff that turned me off. They had just frequented a restaurant where they ordered
bhang lassis, marijuana smoothies.
"Wow, it's really grassy," Greg choked. "You feel anything?"
"Not yet. You?"
"Unh-unh."
Promising to refer other backpackers, we pushed through the heavy wooden doors onto the street, where the mind-altering substance he had just consumed in the large size hit Greg like a semi barreling down the exit ramp, heading for Cracker Barrel. He turned to me, shifting his mandible demonically, his eyes brighter than embers. "Holy [expletive deleted]. Are you as stoned as I am?"
"No," I said, steering him firmly by the elbow. He pranced alongside, alternately giggling at or flinching from the standard Pushkar scenery, the sandalwood beads festooning the bangle-wallah's stalls, the open sewers, the savage white stripes painted across the holy men's noses. "Keep it together," I muttered as he clapped his hands at a monkey seated on a low wall. The monkey shot him the disdainful glance of a prom chaperone, disgusted by the student's sloppy intoxication.
"This is some crazy [expletive deleted]," Greg howled in amazement, ducking to dodge an airborne hazard visible only to him.
I managed to get Greg up the stairs and into bed, where he jiggled and sang and generally behaved like someone higher than Sputnik. Finally, he started to come down. Just as he stretched out, exhausted, the bhang lassi's latent properties struck me. "Greg! Hey, wake up! I'm feeling it!" But Greg, spent, rolled on his side, unable to keep his eyes open after a wan "bon voyage." I am unable to remember much about the next few hours, other than an impression of ripples on the lake and monkey tails flipping around in the moonlight. Compared to our psychotic meltdown in Saigon, it seemed to have been an agreeable few hours. At last I, too, lay down to sleep.
