…more or less since I heard that hong kong actually has wild monekys, I planned to have a look …. but never did it…
so this was a suitable plan for a day trip now … I was actually a bit irritated, because I did some hiking close to that supposed area before, but never saw a monkey …
however, with such clear aim, we should be able to do it ….
so we took the bus to monkey mountain…
…well we took the (same) bus three times to be precise …
the first time we took it to miss the right station … so we went on the other side of the road to take the same bus back … but that was trash, because the bus on the other side was actually still going in the same direction …. confusing? … how we later found out the returning bus actually stopped five meters further on the same side where we got off …. more confusing?
however, after going too far, taking another bus to go even more far until the final stop, we finally got another bus going back to the missed stop … the bus driver was the same like in the first bus … the driver pretended not to recognize anything, but I’m sure he was having fun for himself … seeing these two confused tourists spending there time on the bus….
however, in the afternoon we finally arrived … somewhere close to monkey mountain …. still not sure where exactly we need to go we aimed for a bridge passing the high speed highway, since we felt we need to go on the other side …. and … it seemed we hit the main entrance…
because already on the bridge we saw two monkey bumpers guarding the entrance:
…kind of bizarre … also because I somehow expected them to run away once we come closer, but they didn’t…
… rather the opposite … one of them seemed to want to check my pockets at the entrance….
which made me suddenly realize that it was a very stupid idea to buy three buns and some cookies, packed in the locally most common plastic bags and have them stuffed into my jacketpocket, so that there were half sticking out of it ….. they were basically shouting to the monkeys “ding ding ding … food delivery!”
…since i knew from india already how fast they can grab stuff … I thought about protecting the buns by gently pushing my hand into that pocket … which was probably mistake nr. 2 … because then they seemd to expect me even more to pass my food to them (probably as entrance fee) …
… i tried to explain that everything is just a misunderstanding … they didn’t seem to like misunderstandings … and showed some teeth (probably to signal me that they are hungry)
so we decided to pretend not to have seen them and pass them quickly … what kind of worked out ….
with safety distance to the bumper monkeys we started to rethink, how we should continue … still not clear how we should find the right path without passing the bumpers again …. we spotted the monkey boss …
…and he spotted us …
…and that one was even less shy…
even though he pretended just watching the landscape… but he was walking far too fast for being interested in the landscape …. and so did we… and then he tried to reach out to my tasty pocket…
… but i really didn’t feel like sharing my snacks ….
and he didn’t feel like not sharing and tried to diminish is disadvantage in height …
and blocked the way
then a short confrontation took place (it seemed the boss had mistaken me as a tree, at least he jumped on me and grabbed on my jacket…
That made me finally prefer to walk even faster to get out of reach as quick as possible…. and we retreat directly into the mountains to reorganize ourselves (… e.g. me putting my food in basements bag instead of keeping them in my pocket) … and yes … ironically, as soon as we had entered the nature, there were no monkeys at all….
after a while the monkey mountain without monkeys was also boring, so we went back and figured out where most of the monkeys seem to hang out mostly …
…which was the car parking areas …
… maybe because I hide my lunch, however, these pals seemed to be quite more peacefull … at least they weren’t approaching us anymore … and we tried to keep distance to the boss whenever he appeared somewhere…
the irony in the end was, that the monkeys choose from mountains, lake and forest particularly that areas which had the maximum possible flair of a badly prepared zoo … in between fences …and concrete mountains …
…well… some trees also there …
…. so after we almost finished documenting the complete monkey viallage, we came to enjoy the precious monkey feeding ritual, which seems to regularly take place (and might contribute to the monkeys preferance to hang out at parking sites)
it works like this: father drives on the car parking, and pulls down the window for a few centimeters … and then the laughing son can throw some - previously bought snacks from 711 throw that gap….
but …. not everybody knows how to feed monkeys properly, thats why some nice people posted some signs with food suggestions:
yes! bananas of course - this we know from tv series … but we might not have known their preferance for sandwiches and drinks in tetrapaks …
that the professional monkeyfeeding crews are muc more creative than that, is easy to see by spending some looks in the bushes around, which contain loads of various packagings … some even looked like sushi ….
yeah, that was bizarre!
what we do tomorrow?
with chickenwings to ocean park?
