The other day, some kids from the school we’re going to attend, invited us to climb Penang Hill with them. First of all, let me tell you that what they consider a “Hill” here, is what us old fashioned Kentuckians would call “A FREAKING MOUNTAIN”. And since I’m an intellectual, meaning that I sit on my butt all day and type in my computer (thus this journal), I’m out of shape, so it made climbing/walking up the mountain positively MISERABLE. I had to stop at least fifty gazzilion times just to reach the top. I felt so bad that I kept slowing everyone else down, it was all my fault that we reached the top later than we’d expected. My big brother, Kaleb, even offered to give me a piggy back ride, but that didn’t work out to well, and I made him put me down half-way up a hill…I was afraid I’d break his back.
Did I mention that my brother is scared of monkeys? Because this mountain was filled with them. You see, when Kaleb was pretty young, we were in a zoo in Indonesia, and Kaleb had peanuts that he was feeding the animals. My parents told him not to feed the monkeys, but of course, he didn’t listen. Sticking his hand right into the monkey’s cage, a small-ish monkey ran up, and grabbed his hand. Then it started to pull, and Kaleb started to cry. I don’t remember how old I was, but all I know, is that while Kaleb was screaming, I was crying, and my parents were rolling on the ground, laughing so hard that they couldn’t breathe…We have wonderful parents, don’t we?
Anyways, as we were descending the Mountain of H-E-Double-hockey-sticks, we rounded a curve, lo-and-behold! There were about four monkeys were sitting in the middle of the road. We all walked as far away as possible from them, and tried to ignore them, but some idiot made the Alpha-male angry. It hissed/ran at Sydney, (a girl who was with us) who gave a shout, and ran, then ran at Kaleb, who gave a shout as well and ran. Then it ran at me.
You know how you sometimes get those flashbacks from random times in your life? Well, my mind flashbacked to memories of back at our farm in Kentucky. We used to have this evil rooster that could smell fear.(Even though I‘m pretty sure that chickens can‘t smell…) I mean it, it was the e-pit-o-me of fowl evil. Anyways, if you got to close to it, it would attack you, pecking, and clawing at you horrendously.
So all I could think of when this evil primate was running at my legs, it’s foot long fangs barred, and it’s claws slashing, was “OMIGOSH, IT’S JUST LIKE THAT EVIL ROOSTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”…And I screamed rather much like a chicken, and booked it away from the monkeys of doom. Then everyone else ran as well. The evil monkeys followed us for a little bit, but then stopped.
Then we tied our shoes, which had come undone from our maniacal sprint away from the monkeys , and went on our jolly good way, freaking out about the whole ordeal as we walked, wanting to get as much distance between the primates and ourselves as possible. (despite the fact that it was the middle of the jungle, and there were probably monkeys everywhere…)
Finally, we stopped and sat down under a little hut, made just for idiot white people like us that were stupid enough to actually hike up the mountain. Suddenly, as if called by the lack of our footsteps, about thirty monkeys appeared, and surrounded us.
We all tried not to panic, which, by focusing on the cute baby monkeys who clung to their mothers, I managed to not scream my head off and run into the jungle, most likely to an untimely death by rockslide, or from a heart attack induced by fear. Eventually, there was a sizeable gap in the monkeys, and we were able to walk onto the path that we had to take, even though we were surrounded by monkeys.
Yet again, someone made one of the Alpha-male monkeys angry, and it hissed, and started forward. Not wanting to fall prey to the wrinkly hands of the terrorizing primates, we all started to run. Everybody else that we were with must’ve been some sort of super humans, either that or I’m just slow, because when I started running, I was near the front of the group, but after a few seconds, I was the last person in line…again.
After the second attack of the monkeys, we had to walk down about a bazzilion stairs. Now, I may have had trouble getting up the mountain, but I didn’t have any trouble getting down, because gravity is my friend when moving in a downward sort of direction. But my brother, on the other hand, has the tendency to defy gravity, so he was having issues with descending the path of a thousand stairs, which is what I was told it was called. (It’s a misnomer, there had to be way more than a thousand…)
But we persevered, and finally made it down the mountain, only to emerge in Penang’s Botanical Gardens, which is famous for it’s infestation of, you guessed it! Monkeys…Someone told us that some people even call it the Monkey Garden instead. I could see why, there were monkeys EVERYWHERE. We hurried through as fast as our tired legs could take us.
When the exit was in sight, Kaleb, who had been walking in the back, came running towards the front. Apparently, he’d been yelling at a monkey, and it had turned on him and the person he’d been walking with, Joe. That time they’d stood their ground, and the monkey had finally ran off, but that brought the M.A.C. T.(Monkey Attack Count Total) up to 3.
Finally, we left the park, bought some soft drinks, and waited for Joe and George’s dad to pick us up and take us back to Dalat. Our very loving parents made us walk home from there after spending the whole day out on our feet. And my father says it’s about three miles to our house from Dalat…
But we did get an interesting perk while walking back to our house, about twenty-five or so really, really beast sports cars went driving by, with a complete police escort. Kaleb says they were Ferrari’s, and I say they were Lamborghini’s…The world may never know…