Monkey Attack – 9/8/14

                I feel fairly at home in the woods up here in the Himalayan foothills because the pine forests remind me a lot of Flagstaff and the oak forests remind me of Minnesota or the Northeast. The weird thing is that the wildlife here differs so much from back home. For example, Hemant-ji was telling us about how people don’t let their dogs roam too far because spotted leopards might attack/kill them. It’s crazy to think that such an exotic animal that I’ve only ever seen in a zoo is an everyday nuisance over here. Additionally, there is an abundance of pesky monkeys here.

                Before today I had only seen monkeys from the car window as we made the 3 hour drive from the train station in Katkudam to Sona Pani. This morning, however, while we were eating breakfast we heard a commotion down by our cabins and went down to see what was up. Around 20 monkeys were having a ball climbing our cabins and eating nashpati (pears) that had fallen from nearby trees onto the roofs. We had just done laundry the other day, so a bunch of us ran to take our clothes off the drying line outside and bring them inside so that the monkeys wouldn’t take them and run. We thought we had successfully scared them off with lots of yelling and pear-throwing and so returned to the dining hall to clean up and resume orientation activities. We were very wrong about them being gone.

                All throughout the day we would hear them on the roofs of our cabins and we’d send down Jumaru (the Tibetan mastiff that lives here) to chase them off, not really paying attention to what they were doing. After an afternoon goal-setting powwow I walked down to my cabin only to find that the monkeys had 1) turned on the water full blast outside the cabin 2) ripped up one of the pipes on the roof and 3) totally knocked over all of the chairs on our porch. We ran to get help to stop the deluge of water which was luckily isolated to outside the cabin. Fortunately, the monkeys had only turned a spigot to get the water pouring and the broken pipe was an easy fix.

                Even though the monkeys are annoying it’s hard to deny that they are super cute and really funny. Just now, a momma monkey with a baby hanging onto her belly climbed into the tree across from me and chilled eating a piece of fruit (I didn’t have my camera with me L). They do these funny bounds to get from the ground to the roofs and their butts wiggle as they run away. I don’t know what kind of monkey they are, but they are sort of a white-silver color and are fairly large. We haven’t seen them around here before today and I have mixed feelings about whether or not I want to see them come back.