I know never to have food, give food, or be aggressive to monkeys. Staring at them or being aggressive to a monkey will make it attack you. The general rule with wild animals, it's best to leave them alone and avoid eye contact.
This is the second time I've had a problem with monkeys this year. I've never had a conflict before. My question is, what should you do when they start damaging your property? Do loud noises work?
Today, we parked our scooter away from all the monkeys. As soon as we got off our Scooter, a monkey came out of the bush and jumped onto my scooter. I tried to shoo it away to get off my scooter without showing aggression, but it just hissed at me and took my cheap sunglasses on my bike. It then jumped off my scooter and stayed 2 meters away, playing with it. I thought I would move my Scooter away where my Thai girlfriend tried to get my cheap sunglasses back, but the monkey hissed at her too. I told her not to worry about the sunglasses. At the same time, looking around for somewhere else to park away from monkeys. I was standing 1 meter away from my Scooter when the same monkey gave up on the sunglasses jumped back on my bike, and started hissing at me. I didn't want my bike destroyed, so we found a Buddhist monk, and as soon as the Monk was about 20 meters away, the monkey ran. I want this power! If I have an interaction with a monkey or monkeys again, how can I do what this Buddhist monk did? I know with bears you start waving and make a lot of noise. Tigers, I hear, never break eye contact, run or turn your back on them. Back away slowly and make a lot of noise if it tries to attack.
Brand new Scooter now has two minor crawl marks. I wanted to hit it with my bag but there was other monkeys around hence I didn't want to take on 10-15 of them.