Sunday, January 28, 2007

Inuyama Monkey Park

Yesterday I went to Inuyama again, but this time to see the monkey park. It was pretty far away from the train station, so we had to walk for a long time to get there. The park was a lot better than I thought it would be though. I hadn't expected to see so many different kinds of monkeys there. I forgot to bring extra batteries for my camera, so of course it died like half an hour after we got there. We didn't know this, but the monkey park had not only lots of monkeys to look at, but also an amusement park. The amusement park had lots of cool stuff for kids (and us!) like a ferris wheel, haunted house, go-carts, spinning tea-cups and these things:

They had these big, mechanized animals that you could ride around. I think you just put a couple hundred yen in the panda or whatever, and then the thing takes off, moving its legs and sort of gliding around. It looked pretty fun.
Here are a couple funny signs I saw:


Of course the monkey park was lacking in the way a lot of the monkeys were cared for. Often times they were in cages alone, and the baboon's area was just a big cement dome with no trees or grass, and some of the monkeys looked pretty sick. Of course I don't really know anything about how to create an ideal environment for all these different kinds of monkeys, but as far as I could see, maybe 70% of the monkeys looked like they had everything they needed.

There were lots of Japaese Snow monkeys. Watching these 30 maybe monkeys run around, clap their hands for food, fight with each other and scream at the tourists was pretty disturbing and scary. Just like in a movie or something, there was one of these guys who was really ugly, it looked like he had mange and a number of other problems, but he was also the meanest one. If ever a tourist threw a piece of food down near him, and someone else tried to get it, he got really angry and would run after them until he caught them and then start biting them all over. See what I mean about scary? Here is a picture of a couple nice ones:

Here's a picture of another monkey. I don't remember what kind it is, but jeez is it cute!

I guess that's all of my pictures since like I said, my camera died pretty early on in the day. After about five hours at the monkey park, we went back to Nagoya, searched for a Mexican restaurant in Shin-Sakae, turned out it was closed, had ramen, and then I went home. I was completely dog tired.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

WARNING! DO NOT WEAR MONEYPOO FOR A HAT!

Anonymous said...

Er, Monkeypoo, even.

Anonymous said...

Hey Can I drive the panda too?