Monday, December 06, 2004
Bathing Apes
I miscalculated and ended up with over 500 photos from Japan. It's been a horrible nightmare trying to organise them through iPhoto and flickr. Anyway, after much eyestrain and heartache, I can present my first photoset: snow monkeys.
The monkeys live about an hour outside Nagano, in a place called Hell Valley. It has snow four months of the year, so the monkeys have taken to bathing in hot springs to keep warm. In order to encourage them, so-called Japanese "scientists", actually feed grain to the monkeys while they bathe. This doesn't really distract from the wonderousness of the scene though. The monkeys are amazingly tame, they wander among the tourists blithely. Just like a genuine Japanese onsen, the water is slightly too hot for them. They constantly hop in and out, and seem to dry off in seconds.
You aren't allowed to actually bathe in the main monkey pool. However we stayed 500m down the valley, and the human onsen there was invaded by monkeys each night. During the day we could sit in our onsen, and watch the monkeys in theirs. I really rate this as one of my all time best "animal experiences", up there with surfing with dolphins in Cape Town, and going night diving in Little Cayman.
I miscalculated and ended up with over 500 photos from Japan. It's been a horrible nightmare trying to organise them through iPhoto and flickr. Anyway, after much eyestrain and heartache, I can present my first photoset: snow monkeys.
The monkeys live about an hour outside Nagano, in a place called Hell Valley. It has snow four months of the year, so the monkeys have taken to bathing in hot springs to keep warm. In order to encourage them, so-called Japanese "scientists", actually feed grain to the monkeys while they bathe. This doesn't really distract from the wonderousness of the scene though. The monkeys are amazingly tame, they wander among the tourists blithely. Just like a genuine Japanese onsen, the water is slightly too hot for them. They constantly hop in and out, and seem to dry off in seconds.
You aren't allowed to actually bathe in the main monkey pool. However we stayed 500m down the valley, and the human onsen there was invaded by monkeys each night. During the day we could sit in our onsen, and watch the monkeys in theirs. I really rate this as one of my all time best "animal experiences", up there with surfing with dolphins in Cape Town, and going night diving in Little Cayman.
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