Monkey Madness

This year I decided to seize the day and travel around the world, going to some places I have always wanted to go, do some thing I have always wanted to experience and emerge myself, well, in life basically. I love being able to spend time in a completely foreign place and really getting a taste for it, immersing myself in all that is local. So it seemed fitting to include some volunteer work in South America. With the help of new travel friend Google, and exchanging some emails, I found the perfect place: The Ecuadorian Jungle.

With the strange and vague description I had written out in my note pad, I took a 5 hour bus ride from the country’s capitol Quito to Tena and continued in a cab to the river. There I was to find a man named Jorge, who would take me down the river in his canoe. After some lengthy prayers on the bus (partly for my canoe being there, partly for the bus making it past those intensely steep cliffs) I arrived at the river. It seemed someone was listening, and with a smile on my face Jorge took me ten minutes up stream to the jungle lodge that was to be my home for the next 5 weeks.

As soon as I arrived, I could feel the thickness of the moist air, and a clammy feeling or perspiration that would not leave me for five weeks. The first thing I noticed where the many shades of green, towering into the sky as if some super fertilizer had been released and all the flora and fauna. As I was admiring the live canvas she appeared, little Mona, an endangered wooly monkey, rescued by owner Tom and now convinced she was human. Mona is covered in soft brown fur, and surprisingly clean, considering her daily free time is spent in the high jungle trees searching for fruit to eat.

At night, she loved to sit next to the dinner table and attempt to mimic crying between her tiny little hands, hoping for a few bites of whatever you were consuming. If you didn’t give in to her cuteness, she only needed you to look away for a few seconds and she would be off with your chocolate bar, grinning from up the tree while tearing open the wrapper and enjoying her newest conquest.

Holding this little link of evolution in your arms while she begs you to tickle her was a truly rewarding experience and I will never forget. Tom told me Charles Darwin’s great grandson has also stayed here some years a go and confessed holding Mona was the first time he truly took Darwin’s theory into his heart. I felt truly blessed to have shared some time with this little incredible creature, who shrieked as we parted, the day Jorge paddled me back up the river to continue my journey through Ecuador.