Bali belly was bad enough … then the monkeys attacked | Michael Owen-Brown

Think your tale of holiday horror is bad? Mine involves diarrhoea, an X-rated dessert and a terrifying battle for survival against psychotic monkeys, writes Michael Owen-Brown.

This is Lake Bedugul in Bali. Looks glorious, doesn’t it? Don’t be fooled …

Twenty-two years later, the word “Bedugul” still makes me break out in a cold sweat.

That’s preferable to the clammy, feverish terror sweats that afflicted me in that pustulant Balinese hellhole but still, a helpful reminder that every tropical paradise has a dark side.

My tale of holiday horror started with a pleasant afternoon of boating, veered into the surreal territory of pornographic dessert, and ended with me barricaded within a diarrhoea-spattered room in an apocalyptic last stand against a horde of monkeys hungering for human flesh. 

I’ve always been drawn to volcanoes so on our first visit to Bali as naive and impossibly attractive early twenty-somethings, I dragged my girlfriend away from the nightclubs of Kuta to visit Bedugul, optimistically described as a “mountain lake resort” in one of the island’s vast volcanic craters.

Like all good horror stories set in paradise, everything seemed idyllic at first.

We hired a boat and explored the lake. We admired an ancient Hindu temple on an island. We forgot to apply sunscreen and turned a deep shade of puce. So far, your pretty standard Asian holiday experience.

Things started to get freaky when we went out to dinner.

By this stage, my digestive system had launched a full-scale rebellion and I was feeling decidedly dodgy. Nevertheless, I struggled through dinner and decided to play it safe by ordering something a little more western on the dessert menu – a banana split.

When the waiter brought it out, my girlfriend and I laughed hysterically for five minutes. It was the most obscene-looking dish imaginable – a banana and two balls of ice cream artfully arranged to look like a remarkably accurate reproduction of male genitalia. This X-rated feast was topped with a perfectly placed squirt of watery custard that looked exactly – and I mean exactly – like, um, a certain intimate bodily fluid. It perfectly matched the artistic vision of this depraved dessert.

Think these Balinese monkeys are cute? Think again!

It had been a big day and by this stage my digestive tract had apparently liquefied and decided to migrate south for the winter.

So we returned to what had seemed in the warm light of day a plain but reasonably homely and spacious room. I can’t remember the name of the establishment so let’s just call it the Bates Motel.

As ink-black darkness enveloped Bedugul, we made four exciting discoveries.

The first was that the toilet was blocked. The second was that I needed to use the toilet – a lot. The third was that the door to the bathroom wouldn’t shut, and kept swinging open to ensure optimal dispersal of some truly majestic odours through our bedroom. The fourth was that every employee of this accursed place had apparently gone home (or possibly been murdered).

By this stage the dunny situation had reached crisis point. The toilet was now overflowing, and every fresh gastric explosion sent more of this toxic cocktail slopping on to the floor.

Remember that scene in Trainspotting called “the worst toilet in Scotland”? This was worse.

Still, I knew how to salvage this situation – I’d watched MacGyver as a kid. Using my partner’s bra, I jerry-rigged a mechanism to keep the bathroom door closed … then had to dismantle it five minutes later when I realised I had to use the loo again.

We were on the verge of drifting off into a restless, feverish slumber when a bloodcurdling shriek pierced the air, jolting us upright in terror. Then another … and another.

They were getting closer. It was a troop of monkeys, possibly the same ones that had laughed at us from the lake shore earlier as we tried to moor the boat.

But these weren’t cheeky, loveable daytime monkeys … they were malevolent nightcrawlers out for blood. Suddenly, a tremendous crash overhead. The rabid beasts had climbed on to the corrugated iron roof and started jumping up and down as they howled their terrifying war cry.

It got worse. With a screech of metal, we realised in horror they were now trying to rip up the roof to get to us. And it sounded like they were succeeding.

Sudden silence. Had they left to seek easier prey? After 20 minutes or so I started to relax. My girlfriend had fallen asleep.

But the worst was yet to come. They must have penetrated the roof, because I suddenly noticed a malevolent yellow eyeball staring at me from the pitch-black corner of the ceiling.

As I lay there, paralysed by fear, the eye started drifting closer. They’d pierced the perimeter. Was I hallucinating? Had I been driven to delirium by heatstroke and Balinese bacteria? Closer and closer the unblinking eye approached, until it was hovering immediately over my face.

It wasn’t the jaundiced eye of a psychotic levitating monkey after all … it was a bloody firefly.