Of monks and monkeys

About seven kilometres from Kampong Cham there are two mountains called Phnom Proh and Phnom Srey, meaning Mount Man and Mount Woman. Firstly, it should be pointed out that ‘Phnom’ – ‘mountain’ in Khmer – is used for anything over about 25cm tall, and both Man and Woman took about four minutes to climb, but they have quite an interesting legend attached. There was a woman who had an illegitimate child and had to send him away. This child returned as an adult and fell in love with the most beautiful woman in the village, who happened to be his mother, and asked her to marry him. The mother came up with a challenge, saying that she would marry him only if he could gather up all the men in the village and build a higher mountain than all the women in the village. Both groups worked overnight and had until sunrise to complete their mountains. The women lit a fire while they were building, which fooled the men into thinking the sun had risen, so they stopped working while the women carried on until it was taller than the men’s. And that was how she got out of marrying him. All in all a slightly more palatable version of the Oedipus tale.

Anyway, twice this week I’ve cycled down to Phnom Proh and Phnom Srey, once with Dave and once with Ingran and Gilly. It’s a nice enough place with a large temple, lots of monks and lots of monkeys. Monks are good; monkeys are bad. 


I’m not quite sure how to behave around monks, because generally they should be given maximum respect, but quite a lot of them are novices and so are about 13, and every time I’ve tried to greet them formally they’ve laughed. Anyway, the ones we met today were very friendly and after allowing us to take a picture, they got all their mobile phones out (which I’m not sure they’re allowed to possess) and took photos of us!

Monkeys, however, are not very friendly. It was quite fun to watch them initially, but on Sunday we left quite late, after everyone else had packed up and left, and so I think the monkeys had reclaimed the temple as theirs for the night. As we were leaving, one of them ran quite aggressively towards Dave, who responded by throwing stones (not what I would have done). About forty-five then appeared out of nowhere, including a massive one who was clearly the daddy monkey, so they were definitely up for a fight. After a brief consultation, we decided against it, hopped on our bikes and escaped unscathed.

At least somebody got some boom boom.