Monkeys

Last weekend we went to Villa Tunari with eight other people affiliated with my office. We visited Parque Machía, a wildlife refuge in the upper Amazon basin, at 900 feet elevetion, down from 8,000 feet where we live in Cochabamba. Parque Machía volunteers care for wild animals who have been abused as pets or in zoos and circuses. Most of the park was closed for maintenance after flooding, but we were able to visit the mokney section.

First, we took everything out of our pockets and put it into a locker because some of the mokneys have been trained as pickpockets.

We walked along a trail through the rain forest and suddenly a black spider monkey jumped onto the path and wrapped its tail around my leg, tightly! The bottom eight inches of the monkey´s tail is a skin pad, just like the skin of the palms of its hands and feet, so it can use its tail to grab things and swing from branches.

Another spider monkey leaped towards me and tried to grab my arms. Having been taught not to touch wildlife, I pulled back and the monkey jumped on Gary instead. I asked the Parque Machía volunteer, a young woman from British Columbia, if we should encourage this, and she said it´s fine to touch the monkeys when they approach us.

There were monkeys everywhere, swinging from trees just like in the cartoons, running, playing, and cuddling with humans. One reportedly climbed up high on a rope and then let go freefalling 20 feet into some tree branches.

I sat on a bench and several spider monkeys climbed all over me and sat in my lap. They like to have their backs scratched. A couple of Capuchín monkeys cuddled with me and then slyly stuck their little hands into my pants pockets, opening the velcro pockets but finding nothing.

A mama spider mnkey lay in my lap and let me hold her hand while her baby climbed on me and used its tail to swing from my arm and reach some plants which it ate. Another mama had a smaller baby that held tightly to the mama´s belly. I held its tiny hands and feet. Their palm skin is a little bit thicker, but smoother than human palms. They have tiny fingernails, and tiny ears just like human ears. They like to cuddle with each other as well as with humans.

One monkey grabbed my glasses and pulled them off of my face, but I held onto them and got them back.

A family of coati (tejón in Spanish), including two babies, passed through the clearing.

As we left the park, we looked high up in a tree and saw a bear sitting on a branch. A volunteer, a young woman from Cochabamba, told us that the bear is not native to the rain forest. He is an Andean mountain bear, from the highlands closer to La Paz. When he was a baby, a poacher killed his mother and sold him as a pet to someone in La Paz, who abused him. Now, he is 18 months old, not yet full grown, but he doesn´t know how to live in the wild. One of the Parque Machía volunteers acts as his "dad" and, by acting as an example, is teaching him to climb trees, swim in the river and catch fish.

There are also wild cats in the park, but we didn´t see them because that section was closed. There isa puma that was rescued from a zoo in Oruro where it lived in a cement pit beneath the cage of a lion that constantly peed and pooped on it.

Anyone can come and volunteer at this park. (http://www.intiwarayassi.org/) The park asks for a 15-day commitment.

We walked back into town and went to a restaurant where the menu included three choices: Surubi fish, deer or something else that we couldn´t understand. We asked the owner about the third choice that we didn´t understand, and she said, "It´s similar to that animal over there." Over there as her son´s pet, a rodent as big as a medium-sized house cat. It was on a harness and leash. None of us ordered that.

After our meal, we checked out the rodent. It´s called a jochi, and it´s brown with white spots, like a young deer. I pet it on the head and was surprised that it responded by closing its eyes and nuzzling into the petting like a cat. I almost expected it to purr.

Nonetheless, it´s still a rodent with long yellow rodent teeth, and when I stopped petting the jochi it returned to its rapid sniffing and wiggling of its nose, like a hamster.

We watched some men reapiring the highway in Villa Tunari. The highway is asphalt, but they repair hotels using cobblestones. One man carefully fitted river rocks into the hole in the highway, carefully placing them as close together as possible like a puzzle and sometimes modifying their shape with a hammer. Another man dumped some water on the side of the road, creating mud. He shoveled the mud over and between the rocks, packing it down and making a pretty decent highway surface.

The next day while our house mates went rafting we went to Hotel El Puente, 4 km outside of Villa Tunari. We swam in two of the 14 beautiful pozos, or swimming holes. The pozos are deep and slow sections of an Amazon tributary. They have a sandy bottom, and there were beautiful butterflies everywhere. Orange ones, yellow ones, and the beautiful and huge blue morpho butterflies. We also saw a bright yellow tropical bird.

We saw a tree that walks (grows many above-ground roots, some of which break off when the tree needs to move on account of a changing earth surface due to landslides) and a huge bunch of plants growing in a ball in the air hanging from a vine (like a hanging planter) and many spider-type plants growing high in the air on tree branches.