Aussie dad takes on pack of aggressive monkeys as they lunge at his son in Thailand
An Australian couple have opened up about the terrifying moment wild monkeys tried to attack their family on a remote beach in Thailand.
An Australian dad has opened up about the terrifying moment wild monkeys tried to attack his family on a remote beach in Thailand.
Riley Whitelum and Elayna Carausu, who have amassed 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube with their travel content, were visiting Monkey Beach on Ko Phi Phi Don island with their two young sons.
Mr Whitelum and his sons, Lenny, 5, and Darwin, 1, were watching some monkeys on the beach when one started to look in their bag.
The 38-year-old ran toward the monkey to scare it away from the family’s belongings but the monkey lunged forward. It then lunged at Darwin.
Mr Whitelum scooped up the screaming child in his arms as more angry monkeys came toward them.
He ran to get the bag left on the beach, but a group of five monkeys swarmed him.
Ms Carausu said there was not any food in the bag the monkeys were determined to get into, but there was a passport, their wallets and phones.
Mr Whitelum returned without his children to save their things, fighting off the monkeys in the process.
He told the Today Show on Thursday: “The head honcho was sort of marching down the beach and Lenny said to me ‘Are we in trouble here, dad? Is it going to hurt me?’”
“I said ‘no, we’ll be okay’, but then they went for the bag and then they went for Darwin.”
He then said they got swarmed.
Ms Carausu said her partner then had to “punch a monkey”.
“We can’t say he got bit, but Riley had to punch a monkey and the tooth ended up in his finger in a couple of spots,” Ms Carausu told the program.
He ended up with a bleeding cut on his hand from a monkey’s tooth, which meant he was at risk of contracting rabies – a deadly virus spread to people from the saliva of rabid animals.
“The rate of rabies is super high and it is a 100 per cent death rate if you do get rabies, so he’s had to have 20-plus injections since the incident,” Ms Carausu said.
Mr Whitelum said he had felt bad for punching the monkey, but he acted to protect his son.
Ms Carausu had been snorkelling at the time when she heard screaming from the beach.
Another friend who was on the beach at the time said: “It was hectic. It was actually scary, could have scared him (Darwin) for life.”
Mr Whitelum criticised a crowd of people for watching on and not doing anything to help.
“It was astonishing,” he said.
The family headed into town for medical attention, where the staff at the clinic said they treat one to two people a day from monkey bites.
“I need to have five or more needles into my wound or around it, then five shots over 20 days, then another shot today,” Mr Whitelum explained in a video of the incident that was shared to their YouTube channel.
“So two shots today and five in my finger, and another four shots over the next 20 days.”
During the injections into his finger, Mr Whitelum even passed out.
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Ms Carausu explained that the couple hadn’t done any research on the island before sailing there.
“Had we had known this beach was notorious for monkey attacks, we wouldn’t have gone,” she said.
Mr Whitelum, who grew up in a small country town in South Australia, and Ms Carausu, who grew up in a small coastal town in Western Australia, have spent nine years sailing around the world and document their travels on their YouTube channel Sailing La Vagabonde.
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