Day 196: The Joker Monkeys

From the monstary we had a free day to explore around the area, mostly up on Mt. Emei. The weather was quite cloudy and misty in the morning, so most of us decided to skip the peak in favour of various lower, and supposedly more picturesque trails. We took a bus out part way up the mountain and split up into smaller groups for different paths depending on what we wanted to do for the day, but over the next few hours groups would split up and reform as we came across others from our larger group.

There were a lot of stairs up and down, and for awhile we followed a streambed through the surrounding cliffs. Eventually we got to the much warned about Land of the Joker Monkeys. It's not hard to see why the monkeys are called jokers. They scramble through the trees and swoop down on people, grabbing things from them or jumping on their backs. A lot of people seem to consider the monkeys a dangerous nuisance, and some from our group were quite scared of them, but I think it's mostly just a problem with the monkeys never getting dealt with consistently. Some people encourage them to jump onto their arms or back, to eat out of their hands, or to dig through their pockets for food, then other people hit them for trying to do the exact same things. We were in the middle of their chaos zone for a fair while and I found as long as you didn't encourage them, or would wave a bamboo pole at them if they came at you too much they were no problem at all.

About half of us decided to skip the bus ride back and do the much longer hike through the hills back to the monastary. The paths and temples here were much quieter and we enjoyed finally getting away from the crowds.

Once back we had some dinner and settled in for another night at the monstary.