MONKEY ANTICS

[Martin Hash]

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Africa conjures visions of monkeys perhaps more than any other creature. We had our share of monkey experiences, definitely enough to say we were in Africa. Here are some of the best.

First, baboons are monkeys, not apes, even though they seem very intelligent - because they have tails. A baboon’s natural habitat is wherever it wants it to be. Baboons go where they want, eat what they want, and do what they want. A large male baboon came into our camp, bared its teeth at some people fixing lunch then rushed in to forcibly take a loaf of bread from a grown man’s hands. Another time, in Nakuru National Park, Kenya, an adolescent male baboon nonchalantly walked up to our safari vehicle, jumped up and climbed through the popup roof looking for something good to eat. He manhandled whoever got in his way, grabbing at bags until the driver chased him off with a club.

In Nigeria, a vervet monkey aggressively attempted to scare off the people watching our vehicle but perhaps it was only providing a distraction for its three compatriots to sneak in and grab the chocolate bars out of our bags. They then ran off, happily displaying their booty from the safety of the treetops. As a final affront, when they were finished, they dropped the wrappers onto our heads. In Angola there was a tame vervet monkey tied to a chain on a small perch at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served boiled crawfish. He would grab and eat popcorn from our hands but what he really loved was cold Coca-cola.

In Mole National Park in Ghana, I watched a female green monkey, carrying a baby wrapped around her stomach, push a lady out of her chair on the veranda of a restaurant and take her sandwich and all the sugar cubes. Then it climbed up the wall, grabbed a live lizard and ate that.

Our most thrilling experience also involved baboons. While hiking through the glorious Simien Mountains in Ethiopia, we encountered a large group of Bleeding Heart (Chalata) baboons with well over 100 members. They are larger than the other baboons we’d seen, and had thick shaggy coats of hair on their shoulders, looking like elegant capes. At first they kept their distance but after we’d sat down for a few minutes, first the Alpha male then the adolescents and finally the mothers with babies on their backs came near us and casually assumed whatever interesting things keep them busy all day. We could have reached out and touched them they were so close.

Colobus monkeys are large and black with a white cape. While having one of the best fresh trout lunches of my life at the Trout Tree restaurant in Kenya, wild but acclimated colobus monkeys waited in the tree overhead for us to leave our food for maybe five seconds so that it could be snatched away. They seemed totally unfazed by our presence, probably considering humans a nuisance in the way of a fish dinner.

The lemurs of Madagascar aren’t really monkeys but they evoke the same feeling of cute and cuddliness. I suppose evolution can only support either monkeys or lemurs because neither can be found in the other’s habitat. I’ll include lemurs in my “monkey” memoirs, otherwise they won’t get the proper attention they so deserve.