One the huge perks of volunteering with this couple is that in exchange for teaching the husband takes us ‘on adventures’ during the week. At first we didn’t think much of this because they very casually said ‘we will go somewhere tomorrow- so wake up at 8 o’clock.’ But we quickly caught on that these adventures were really cool opportunities and definitely something to look forward to.
Adventure 1: Monkey Temple
The first adventure that our host, Pong, took us on was a trip to the Monkey Temple (with caves). On the way there, Pong laughed at the idea of feeding bananas to Monkeys saying that “monkeys eat rice; they no like banana”.
For a 60 baht (under $2) donation to the temple, we got a 2 kg bag of rice to feed the monkeys. Pong spread this along a driveway through the temple grounds as he drove attracting hundreds of monkeys. One even jumped up and tried to pull the bag from his hands as he was driving. He later shot a small rock at the “Bad Monkey” with his sling shot.
There were also some caves that had statues of monks meditating that were pretty creepy. The one guy in the picture looked like a skeleton.
There was also this one area of the grounds that was a nursery area- all the moms with their babies hung out amongst those few trees.
All around very cool experience getting so close to the monkeys and watching them interact and start fights amongst each other and going into the cave.
Life as a Local in Syros, Greece 