Jubilation and monkeys

     I awoke that morning to the sound of men chanting rhythmically seemingly circling around the streets of the town.  I couldn't imagine what the occasion could be.  I got up and went to breakfast where a TV was playing, and the news was huge.  Mugabe resigned!  And thus 37 years of rule was ended.  Clips of hysterically joyful Zimbabweans dominated the news, and I wondered if the men I'd heard earlier were demonstrating in some African solidarity thing.  Turns out later they were just cadets from a local police academy, and that's what they do certain mornings. 
     It was an unusually early morning, requiring being up, breakfasted, and ready to go by 7:10.  And this was a big day--this was my first "trek," as they're called in Africa, and  this first trek was in pursuit of rare golden monkeys.
     In her altogether-too-brief lifetime, Dian Fossey got an important message out loud and clear.  If you want to save a threatened species, you MUST have the cooperation of the local people, and if you want the cooperation of the local people, then they MUST have a way to make a living from those animals.  It used to be, and still is to a lesser extent, the big game hunting industry in Africa, which sold the intuitively messy concept that if you want to save animals, you have to kill them.
     Big game hunters will boast about how the meat from the trophy animals they kill goes to feed local people, that people are paid to be guides and provisioners, and that the huge permit fees (like, I've heard, up to $50,000 for a single lion) all contribute mightily to the economy and especially the economy that keeps the species going.  Imagine all the gorilla heads and hands that decorate the homes of hunters all over the world, not to mention all the horns and heads of hundreds of other kinds of animals. 
     But with the likes of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey being televised by National Geographic, the first world learned to love the "exotic species" of the world, and began to appreciate them for their living traits and doubting their natural ferocity and killability.  Yes, both women were doing important scientific research, but along the way they found that people wanted to know about the LIVES of these animals, and that the more they knew about the lives of these animals, the less they wanted to kill them.
     But they DID want to see them.  The wildlife photographing safari, while popular and rewarding, required animals to be lured to particular viewing spots with food and fencing (as, of course, did hunting as well.)  The new solution seems to be TREKKING.
     In the case of golden monkeys, the government makes a commitment to habituate groups of the animals to people.  We were told that it takes

approximately three years to habituate a group of golden monkeys to people.  This is done by simply having people sit with the wild monkeys, getting progressively closer and closer, not interacting with them in any way, above all NOT scaring them, but not bribing them with food or coercing them with fences either.
     This VERY labor intensive VERY expensive protocol results in entire groups of animals who are so accustomed to human presence that no, they don't greet them and want to play with them, no, they don't want to attack them or run away from them, but rather they are simply indifferent.  They go about their business--monkey business in this case--and pay no attention whatever to the people gaping at them.  For a gaper like me, it was the closest experience to being invisible that I've ever had. 
    There were about 200 monkeys in this group, some little ones only a matter of a week or so old, and loads of adults, most engaged in the business of finding the tenderest piece of bamboo sprout in a forest made up almost entirely of--well--bamboo.  As you would expect, the youngsters ran around with each other, climbed trees, practicing jumping from one tree to the other, and tossing things.  We were warned that occasionally a young monkey might mistakenly run up a person's leg or jump on one's back, but we should not be concerned.  Of course I was hoping for that to happen, but it did not.  Neither did the other warned-about experience--somewhat less pleasurable:  getting peed on by monkeys above us in the trees. 
      We weren't allowed to even have any food in our pockets when we were amongst the monkeys--or even a water bottle.  And we were only allowed to stay one hour.  Period.  No more, no less.  Apparently some one had decided that that was the most any monkey should have to put up with people in any one day.  So after one hour precisely of photoing and watching these guys, we were firmly told to go, and we were escorted back down Mount Sabinyo, down through where the forests end and the potato fields begin.  I was pleased not to feel out of breath despite the rather steep climb and the altitude and its being pretty warm. 

We all wondered, after we left, if the monkeys were telling each other how nice it was to have us go so they could have their bamboo forest back to themselves again.  
     And I'm sure they could have no idea that it was BECAUSE of us tourists that they had their bamboo forest and life to enjoy.