mals was encouraged by locals outside the 

 forest; at dozens of stalls, men and women 

 relentlessly hawked both monkey food 

 and souvenirs. Huge buses and smaller 

 minivans disgorged more than a thousand 

 people a day to view the monkeys. Al- 

 though many of the tourists were Asian, 

 Australian, or European, by far the great- 

 est number of visitors were from other In- 

 donesian islands, such as Java. 



After a few days of observation, I un- 

 derstood why the monkeys were so badly 

 behaved — they have been taught to be ob- 

 noxious. At the entrance to the temple at 

 the Sangeh Monkey Forest, about thirty 

 men who call themselves "guides" sit and 

 wait for the tourists. Although dressed in 

 appropriate temple garb — a sarong and 

 scarf wound at the waist — they are not of- 

 ficials of the temple; this is a business. 

 Each man owns a Polai'oid camera, and his 

 job is to manipulate the tourist into buying 

 a photograph. The method is simple: As a 

 tourist enters, a guide tags along offering 

 tidbits of information (mostly incoirect) 

 about monkey behavior. At the first sight 

 of a monkey, the guide pulls bits of food 

 out of his pack and puts it on the tourist's 

 shoulder. The monkey, of course, leaps up. 

 The animal quietly munches away, and the 

 Polaroid camera flashes. The monkey is 

 then shooed off, often hit, and the guide 

 demands 6,000 rupia (about $4). 



In most cases, people are amused and 

 give the money. But sometimes the 

 clammy toes of a monkey on an unsus- 

 pecting neck cause real terror. The tourist 

 will twist and turn, while the monkey, 

 tossed about and confused, becomes agi- 

 tated and bites. These protest bites never 

 break the skin, but they do hurt and 

 bruise — I know from personal experience 

 (about thirty bites). 



The guides — I called them the Polaroid 

 gang — also foster mass thievery among 

 the monkeys. When a monkey steals a 

 nonfood item, such as a pair of glasses, it 

 gets rewarded with a bunch of bananas or 

 a bag of peanuts from the guide. The pur- 

 pose is to distract the thief and grab the 

 goods back. From the monkey's point of 

 view, stealing translates into an edible re- 

 ward. This destructive cycle instigated by 

 the Polaroid gang guides, who are just try- 

 ing to make a living in a poor country, has 

 been going on for over a decade. 



The scene at Sangeh brings out the 

 worst in both human and monkey behav- 

 ior — stealing, screaming, injury, and in- 

 timidation. The day I was attacked by a 

 large subadult male who gnawed on my 

 neck to get my glasses, I decided it was 



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On an obliging tourist's shoulder, a monkey takes time to eat a banana. 



Meredith F. Small 



time to leave. I was beginning to hate my 

 subjects — the tourists and the monkeys. 



I expected the situation at Sangeh to be 

 repeated all across Bali because of the 

 pressure of tourism. The island is the start- 

 ing point for most tours of Indonesia. It is 

 easily accessible from Asia and Australia 

 and has been known for decades to Euro- 

 pean tourists as the land of perfect 

 beaches. Bali also has cultural allure, re- 

 volving around its own brand of Hin- 

 duism. To visit Bali is to see a delicate bal- 

 let accompanied by a mystical gamelan 

 orchestra, watch women with huge loads 

 of fruit balanced on their heads move in an 

 undulating line toward a temple, or bar- 

 gain with fine craftsmen for carved 

 wooden masks or intricately cut shadow 

 puppets. Until now, the Balinese have 

 been able to retain their culture, despite 

 the onslaught of two million tourists annu- 

 ally. But as the monkeys of Sangeh 

 demonstrate, the relationship between 

 Bali and its tourists is wearing thin. 



I left Sangeh and headed south to one of 

 the more remote temples, Pura Uluwatu. 

 Perched on the southwestern tip of the is- 

 land, the temple looks like the prow of a 

 ship thrust into the sea. A troop of about 

 fifty longtails come and go here, wander- 

 ing through the low scrub and out on the 

 cliffs. "I feed them whenever I see them," 

 the guard told me, "but that isn't every 

 day." He pointed out that there are mon- 

 keys living along the edge of the sea on the 

 cliffs, undisturbed by the surfers who 

 come from all comers of the world to work 

 the waves of Uluwatu Beach. 



My time at Uluwatu was spent in peace- 

 ful reflection. The monkeys came around, 

 checked me out, took a few peanuts from 

 the hundred or so tourists that passed by 

 daily, and left. They only became aggres- 

 sive when they spied a plastic water bottle. 

 To these inhabitants of the dry Bukit 

 Peninsula, water — not food — was the lim- 

 iting resource. Monkeys would sneak up 

 to tourists, grab bottles right from their 

 hands, and empty them. Monkeys only sat 

 on people — myself included — to get a 

 good view of other group members or 

 maybe to groom their hosts, systemati- 

 cally flicking through hair in search of dry 

 flakes of skin. 



Uluwatu is the opposite of Sangeh. The 

 wheels of tourism have not yet been set 

 into motion at Uluwatu. Consequently, 

 fewer tourists are around to lure the mon- 

 keys with food, and there are fewer hawk- 

 ers and no Polaroid camera guides. 



Evidence of a peaceful monkey-human 

 interaction made me wonder how an area 

 could develop from the low-key situation 

 at Uluwatu to the intense arena at Sangeh. 

 I began hearing about another temple, 

 Alas Kedaton where, according to many 

 travelers, "the monkeys are nice." This I 

 had to see — a highly visible tourist site 

 with "nice" monkeys? 



Alas Kedaton is a tiny scrap of forest 

 near the city of Tabanan, west of Sangeh. 

 In addition to two troops of monkeys, sev- 

 eral hundred flying foxes, or fruit bats, in- 

 habit the trees. The site doesn't yet have 

 the constant influx of tourists that Sangeh 

 has, but a visit to Alas Kedaton now ap- 



10 Natural History 3/94 



