Are you a delivery rider, or have you ever been one? If so, you know it can be fun, but also challenging in a number of ways. Sure, you may pay less at the pump to fill up than delivery drivers do, and your general experience might be more fun just because you’re doing it on two wheels. Still, bad weather, hazardous road conditions, traffic, and other challenges may affect you differently than they would if you were in a car.
Specific hazards, of course, vary by location. Take Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, for example—where long-tailed macaque monkeys can be a real menace when there’s food involved. These macaques are native to Singapore, and local residents have learned to live with them over time.
NTU, specifically, is located near what the Jane Goodall Institute of Singapore calls “a recovering secondary forest.” As a result, monkey sightings in and around buildings on the NTU campus are quite common, and you can find countless photos, videos, and stories about macaque encounters all over any social media platform you care to visit.
Anyway, back to this specific NTU food delivery rider and his March, 2022 macaque encounter. It’s not clear what kind of macaque experiences this rider had in the past. In any case, he’d parked his Yamaha Aerox at the curb, complete with his GrabFood delivery service top box mounted on the rear rack. He was off delivering food to someone on campus when he came back to find a band of three macaques surrounding his bike, and who then chased him away (at least temporarily) from continuing on his delivery rounds.
Macaques, as it happens, are both very smart and very bold. National Parks Singapore has an entire webpage devoted to topics including monkey-proofing your home, harvesting fruits from any fruit trees on your property regularly so you don’t attract them, and also what to do if you encounter monkeys, either inside or outside your home. According to NPS, it turns out that macaques know to associate plastic bags with food. So, the official advice is to use cloth backpacks and other types of bags to make what you’re carrying less attractive to any nearby macaques.
Still, it seems reasonable to think that these macaques may have learned to associate food with those bright green top boxes—especially because they have multiple senses and can probably smell it quite well. It’s not clear if this delivery rider had another order waiting inside the top box while he was off his bike to deliver the first one. Stories like this one are pretty common, particularly on the NTU campus. The moral of the story seems to be, stay safe on your bike, and always watch out for local wildlife.
