I beg to pardon? Well, in Samui a pretty normal sight, although getting rarer and rarer by the day.
Koh Samui used to be the coconut provider for pretty much all of Thailand, before it was discovered by tourism.
A story that keeps amusing me, is that in the 'old' days, the black sheep of the family were given the useless beach land and the good or favorite sons and daughters got the worthwhile coconut fields, sometimes in the middle of nowhere. Well, things have changed and all the black sheep are laughing all the way to the bank in the meantime. In Chaweng beach land prices are closing in on multi million deals since a couple of years already.
Back on track though, all these coconuts had to get out of the trees somehow. Since not all men are that well practiced to climb at times very high coconut trees, monkeys were trained to go up in the trees, rotate the coconuts and drop them to the ground, where they were collected.
This picture shows a current day pick up truck loaded with coconuts and two monkeys that are trained for the job at hand.
A picture that always does it, a baby monkey and a cute one as well.
Nowadays once every couple or months or so, my parents in law have some guys come over to get the couple of coconuts that our trees in the garden produce. The price of the coconuts has since the 'good old' days drastically dropped, from 6 to 10 Baht per coconut to maybe 2 Baht per nut if lucky.
Another local Samui tradition that is about to run it's course, unfortunately. In the coconut business there's not as much to be made anymore as it used to do. There's much more money in various tourist related activities, funnily enough, amongst them are a couple of Monkey Training schools.
From, a sunny Samui,
Camille
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