Found the monkeys

Thurs 10 August 2006
Rob and I had breakfast with and Alvaro, then got ready to go in search of monkeys. Al said that the Beach Forest was the closest place he knew of where monkeys are (a little over a mile away). I kept hoping to find monkeys before then, but we did not. I heard them a few times, but they seemed really far away, up the volcano. We got to the Beach Forest and had to hop over some barbed wire to get in. It was pretty tangled and difficult to maneuver. After walking around a bit, we heard monkeys. We darted off in that direction, through impossibly difficult thorns and underbrush, up and over big lava rocks. We saw nothing. I thought that maybe what we had heard had actually been across the road. We tunneled through the forest and got back out to the road. A guy was coming by on his horse, so I asked him if he knew where there were monkeys. He gave a very long answer that I did not quite understand but I think it ended with him asking me if I wanted to buy or rent a horse from him to go up the San Ramon waterfall. I declined. Just then, the monkeys howled again. The were very close, on the volcano side of the road. I took off running through a field to get to them. There was immensely thick underbrush at the edge of the forest. I somehow disregarded these obstacles and got to the howlers. They were amazing. Right away I saw a male, a female, and a juvenile. I could tell there was at least one more male howling nearby, and I could hear some howls very far off into the distance up the volcano. I knew there were other howlers around, it was just impossible to navigate through the brush and thorns and rocks and then to see then through the canopy. Rob wandered around, hacking away at things until he got something in his eye that did not feel good. He flushed it out with water and I asked him if he wanted to go back to the hacienda. He said he was going to go back, but that I should stay in the forest with the monkeys.

So I stayed. I wandered around and found a total of 13 monkeys; they were kind of split up into 2 separate subgroups. I saw at least 2 adult males, 4 juveniles, and the rest were adult females. One male and one female had collars with silver tags on them, so this is definitely the group that was studied several years back. That means they are used to people and that I can identify at least a couple of them individually. That also means that they have stayed in the same area since that last study was conducted, at least 6 or 7 years ago. It is probably the same group that tends to go back and forth across the road between the beach and volcano. That might be an interesting dynamic to figure out: Why do the monkeys cross the road? I was here 2 years ago during one of the times when they decided to cross from the beach, but I found it too difficult to follow them once there were on the volcano side. All that underbrush just made walking around quite impossible.

I realized just how difficult it was to maneuver when I tried to leave the forest. There was absolutely no clear path; it was like walking through a wall of dense vegetation. Even the machete didn’t help all that much. To make matters worse, there were giant spiders everywhere, but at least they were pretty (red and yellow and black). At one point, one of them was climbing up my leg, which I suppose ruins my theory that “they’re more afraid of me than I am of them.” But, I’m still alive so I guess there’s no harm. My journey out of the forest became almost laughable. I was not lost; I knew exactly how to get back to the road and it wasn’t even very far. There was just absolutely no way to get there. This is the true essence of the jungle. The vines I could break okay, but some of the branches were as thick as my arm and crisscrossing from the ground to high above my head. It took me almost an hour to tunnel out of there and I was covered with scratches when I arrived to the road. I wondered how on earth I had made it in there and why I couldn’t have taken the same route on my way out.

The road back to Mérida is a lot of uphill. 10% grade in some sections. It took me about 25 minutes to walk back the 2km (1.2 miles). When I got here, I was relieved to find that Rob had recovered from his eye thing and was calmly working on his computer. He ordered us lunch and I took and ice cold shower, which under the circumstances, wasn’t that bad. He also told me that he had a lot of trouble getting out of the forest and it had taken him a really long time. He thinks it will be totally fine and manageable if we just hire a couple guys to go out there with their machetes and make trails through it. There are remnants of 7-year old trails in some places, its just been so long since anyone worked there that they have become overgrown.

At any rate, I am assuaged that I have found monkeys and need to get some rest. Here's a picture I took in the forest today.