Monkey Buffet Festival
- 🐘 2,000 macaques
- ✨ Genuinely strange
- 📸 Photogenic chaos
- 🚇 Day trip from Bangkok
Once a year, the town of Lopburi builds elaborate tiered displays of fruit, vegetables, sweets and soft drinks across the grounds of a thirteenth-century Khmer temple, invites the press, and then lets around two thousand macaques destroy the lot. It is one of the few festivals anywhere that is exactly as advertised, and it has been going since the 1980s.
What actually happens
The setting is Phra Prang Sam Yot, three laterite Khmer towers in the middle of Lopburi old town, and the nearby San Phra Kan shrine. Several tonnes of food — watermelon, pineapple, durian, lettuce, rice sculptures, jellies, soft drinks — are arranged on long tables in careful pyramids.
There is an opening ceremony with dancers, speeches and the sheets pulled off the tables. Then the monkeys arrive, and within a few minutes the arrangements are gone. The rest of the day is macaques eating, fighting, stealing from each other and sitting on the ruins looking pleased.
The origin story ties to the Ramakien, the Thai Ramayana, in which the monkey army of Hanuman helps Rama and is rewarded. The practical origin is a local hotelier in the late 1980s looking for a way to put Lopburi on the tourist map, which worked spectacularly.
When it happens
The festival is held on the last Sunday of November, so unlike most Thai festivals its date follows a fixed rule rather than the lunar calendar and can be worked out years ahead.
| Year | Dates | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 24 November | — |
| 2025 | 30 November | — |
| 2026 | 29 November | — |
| 2027 | 28 November | Fixed by the last-Sunday rule |
The main event runs through the morning and into the afternoon. Go early — the opening ceremony and the first assault on the tables are the whole show, and both are over well before lunch.
Getting there
From Bangkok: Direct trains from Krung Thep Aphiwat to Lopburi run through the day. The station sits a few minutes' walk from Phra Prang Sam Yot, which makes this an easy day trip with no transfers. 2–2.5 hrs each way.
From Bangkok: Minivans from Mo Chit, or about two hours by car on Highway 1. 2–3 hrs.
From Ayutthaya: Trains north to Lopburi take about an hour, so the two sit neatly in the same trip. 1 hr.
This is a day trip, not an overnight. Lopburi is a pleasant provincial town with a good night market, but there is no reason to stay unless you want to combine it with Ayutthaya, which sits on the same railway line an hour south.
The monkeys are not a petting zoo
Lopburi's macaques are wild, numerous and completely unafraid of people. They take sunglasses, phones, hats, drinks and bags, and they are fast. Carry nothing loose, wear nothing you would mind losing, and keep food out of sight until you are well away from the temple.
Bites and scratches happen every year. Do not feed them by hand, do not make eye contact with a large male, and do not get between a mother and an infant. If you are travelling with small children, keep them close.
The monkey population has grown to the point that Lopburi has run culling and relocation programmes in recent years, and parts of the old town live behind mesh screens. The festival is charming; the underlying situation in the town is more complicated than it looks.
What it costs
This is close to the cheapest festival in Thailand to attend. The event is free, the train from Bangkok costs a nominal fare, and there is no reason to stay overnight.
Entry to the Phra Prang Sam Yot temple grounds is a small fee. Beyond that, the only spending is lunch and the train back.
Because it falls on the last Sunday of November, it sits in the same week as Loy Krathong and the Pattaya fireworks, so it slots into a trip you were making anyway rather than needing one of its own.
Is it worth the trip?
If you are in Bangkok on the last weekend of November, yes, without much argument. It costs a train fare, it takes a day, and it is genuinely unlike anything else you will see. The photographs are also absurdly good, which is why the festival travels so far online every year.
If you are planning an entire trip around it, think harder. It is a morning's entertainment in a small town, not a multi-day festival, and the monkeys are present in Lopburi every other day of the year anyway — just without the pineapple.
Worth knowing too that the macaque population is a real problem for the people who live there, not just a tourist attraction. Shops in the affected streets work behind wire screens, and the town has run relocation and sterilisation programmes to bring the numbers down. The festival is a celebration of an animal the town has a genuinely difficult relationship with.