Trip to the Sacred Monkey Forest

Today we walked to the end of monkey forest road, which terminates in the "sacred monkey forest". About 300 monkeys live in the forest (according to their pamphlet), and I'd say we saw maybe half that number running around the path on the half-mile walk we took.

Here's a male (which you can identify by its size, and, closer-up from the mustache-like facial hair it grows) on a temple wall.

And the same male closer up.

This one is a female (again, the size, the baby-en-tow (though this isn't always a sure sign), and the beard-like facial hair distinctive of females).

And one we spotted sleeping in a tree... (something I kind of wish I could do)

Tourists were encouraged to buy and feed them bananas which is something I tried...

A more enterprising monkey climbed me and decided to eat his on my shoulder (something I'd see happen to other people, so I wasn't too freaked out)

I thought he was going to share his banana with me, but this turned out not to be true

It took some doing to get him off my shoulder. He suspected that I had more bananas in my backpack (true), and so his plan was to sit on my shoulder until I gave him the rest. If other monkeys tried to approach me, he would bare his teeth at them, clearly staking his claim. I tried to shoo him off a little bit, which did go very well, and tried to put a banana on a nearby ledge so he'd have to jump off to get it, but it turns out a monkey has a rather longer reach than I had calculated, so that didn't work either. Eventually, one of the park guides (who monitor thing) came over and shewed him off. Very exciting!

My other favorite part was watching the younger monkeys play in an artificial pool with some branches over it. They loved to cannon-ball off the branches into the water, try to knock each other off the branches, and generally behave like mischevious kids. It was awesome (though very difficult to photograph).