Monito vea, monito haga

halo there friends, what is happening in your neighborhood lately?

all's well in my neck of the woods. it's winter here so the crickets/frogs/sounding incests are at their very peak of noise production. that and the wind makes for quite the nice soundtrack. it shall be hitting stores soon.

heyyyyy guess who saw monkeys? i probably didn't share with any of you my long term bolivian jungle goals, but now you know that they totally involved monkeys. i do live in the middle of the jungle, literally. and yes the men strolling by on horses are on their way to hunt tigers. anyways to cut a story short, i hadn't yet seen any monkeys. the other day i realized i was leaving and because i hear them ALL the time, the seeing of the monkeys was on the top of my must dos. the two monkey sounds that occupy my environment are 1. the big burly roar (which i suspect comes from the big burly variety) 2. ooo ooo ahhh ahhh (the cute and lively, very similar to cartoon version)

i've been on lots of accompanied jungle walks. with the lack of my time left, i decided a solo trip was needed. i've heard the monkeys are curious and don't fear noise but tend to shy away from large groups. i took off down the forest path (aka latest forest destruction road) and took in my surroundings. it's fascinating how fascinating trees (and the flying of neon green yellow parrot friends) becomes if you pay it some really focused concentration.

This bolivian jungle consists of palm trees, motocou (a thinner more palm frommy variety), the tall old wise trees (the only tree in the forest sacrificed in slash and burn), Bibosi (the best hugging tree eva), all filled in by the unnamed out of control jungle growth. about mid way down the road i heard some Motocou rumbles. I stopped en plano esquina, plain path corner, and listened. Most normal americans who haven't lived in the bolivian jungle for the past few months probably would have been really quiet and busted out the tippy toes. i guess by now i've realized this one, me, is not so normal. i heard the ooo ooo ahh, i saw the palm fronds bounce up and down and i knew the real monkey hunt had begun. from there i pretty much chilled for the next half hour to hour... whistling and making cool imitative soundings, jumping around a lil bit, doing a little yoga/tai chi/"i'm interacting with monkeys" stretch sequence... and the rest is golden. you may find this hard to picture, but i think after dengue, deportation, political blockade... i've hopefully prepped you well. Monkey see monkey do is no joke. These little guys were great. I saw the little gray, black face variety. The first dude came out to give a peak (emerged from the heavy fronds to where i could see him) and from there, with my combined whistling, jumping, hooting, the rest of his forest friends followed. i prob saw about 6 in total and a larger darker a variety tree climbing in the distance. i stayed a while and as the sun started to set i returned American and thought "oh oh what happens if these monkeys really get curious... how close with they come?" after that, i soaked in the sights, said my goodbyes and jogged away.

basically 1st monkey sighting was a crazy success. I was stoked... I had definitely been waiting and the end result may have been greater than i had imagined. now I have one more reason to come back, for I know the monkeys totally would be my friends. Mumi told me, hey maybe next time they'll invite you back to their place. Ha ha.. that Mumi:).

oh yeah... we have this funny ISI (young catholic med students and docs and doc's wife nurse and priest) group visiting for the past 2 weeks. they are way more nutty and completely different than any group we've had. They are 9 Americans in total and they are here for "cultural immersion." the first week they were here our Palacios region was under intense political blockade. Anyways suffice to say they are silly nervous english speaking stomach sick a bit culturally unaware Ameri-cans. This is all fine and dandy because we all have our ways and we all have our rights to travel. Yesterday one of the group members said "Hey guys, did you hear today we get to see the Mayans?" Basically they are really into saying the words "indigenous people" and some genius thinks this part of the world was once inhabited my Mayans. It's cool America is geographically unlucky and when are world is flat we can't expect anyone to see it round. As always, I played along to the Mayan gig well. They wanted to see some Mayan paintings while they were here so this week at the clinic we collected a smattering of little kid "Mayan" artwork. the mayan kids had a blast with ISI's crayons and markers and the Americans can write home, "That's right honey, I was culturally immersed." A win, win situation:). Except for maybe the graves of the real Mayans.

Thank the world because it has monkeys.
RScout