Japanese Wild Monkeys

The week is passing incredibly quickly, and the later-rising sun means slightly increased laziness for Brian and me. Where we had been getting up at 4:30 or so, we now frequently sleep past 5:30; this, of course, means reduced quality time spent with our Single Speeds.

However – we did manage to get motivated yesterday morning, and hit the road then the trails at around 6:30 in the morning. We did one of our old favourites – a short but invigorating ride that took us into the mountains, through some fields, over some obstacles and back down into town.

During our rapid decent through a particularly overgrown part of the trail, I heard a squawk, which I thought might have been a boar, and not worth calling to Brian to stop, since the boar would surely have been gone in a flash. However – about a hundred metres later – Brian had to come to an abrupt halt in order to pull a large spiderweb (and its resident “very large spider”), off of his face. While stopped, I heard the squawk again, and some large animal movement in the forest around us. As Brian freed himself from his spider mate, I looked around and spotted a large monkey in a tree only about 10 feet away from us. I pointed him out to Brian, who then quickly saw that we were in fact surrounded! There were three more monkeys in a tree just two feet or so to our left, and more monkeys higher up in the tree tops.

Here in Susono city we've seen monkeys several times, but each time is just as thrilling as the last – I mean, how often have you seen wild monkeys? However, they can be dangerous (I've heard), so as soon as we felt we'd enjoyed the wild life enough (no camera of course!), we continued our rapid descent and left the monkeys behind us.

This is a photo of a Japanese macaque like the ones we saw, but since we'd left the apartment without a camera (which is really the only guarantee that we'll see something interesting), I just got this image from a web search: