tikistitch

So, wanna monkey around?

You never know, landing in a foreign country, how much credence to give the guidbooks. They may tell you so and so is the greatest thing, and then you take a train and a bus and hike 5 miles only to find it's basically wine country.

This one sounded dubious, and we were not encouraged when the bus let us off at the bottom of a more than slightly steep hill, with instructions to hike, in the upward direction, for about 40 minutes. Hike? tiki's don't hike. Jeebus.

The monkey park is actually located in a fairly beautiful valley. But, you kind of quit noticing that. We'll splain.

You pay your admission, and then you see a couple monkeys.

And then you see a couple more monkeys....

And then, well, you're kind of surrounded. And, as you can see in the pictures, there's no fences. There's just a couple of signs to the effect of "NO TOUCH MONKEY!"

So, the attraction of this site for our primate buddies is the hot springs, and evidently, during the long winter months, the monkeys descend from the hills to splash around in the warm water.

But, since doting people feed them, they also hang out in the summer. And, er, monkey around.

And since it's the 21st century, need we mention, the monkey's have THEIR OWN WEB SITE!!

These are mostly Mr. Tiki's photos, because he takes better photos. He also took a couple videos of the surroundings.

You can see the setup of the place pretty well, and that, well, you definitely get your money's worth o' monkeys.

Pretty danged cool. And, no, there was no poo-flinging. And the monkeys were well-behaved too!