Those Crazy Monkeys

My apologies on my absence from the world of blogging for several weeks. I have no one to blame but myself. And my shitty internet connection. And being overworked. And power-outages.

Jen and I just returned from my new favorite holiday at International School Manila entitled “2 Week Fall Break!” Unbelievable how awesome my life has become.

We decided that instead of exploring other exotic countries of Southeast Asia, that we instead would explore some of the 7000 islands of the Philippines. This decision was aided by the fact that some member of the Philippine Work Visa Committee actually has our passports still, and I did not know who exactly to bribe.

We headed south to the island province of Palawan for tropical island paradise. It did not disappoint. Our small plane touched down in the province’s capital, Puerta Princessa. The main attraction here seemed to be the bizarre fact that there were 8 tricycles (local taxis) per every one traveler. A real buyer’s market. I used my slick negotiation skills and non-existent Tagalog to obtain a tricycle ride to the next town, which we all agreed was about 12 km away. The driver promptly drove us exactly 12 km into the middle of a rice field, pointed to his odometer, kicked us off the trike, and drove off. Great. Undaunted, we flagged down a giant jeepney (the Philipino equivalent of a bus) and made our way to the town of Sabang.

In Sabang, one could take the 6 km “Monkey Trail” to the Underground River (a World Heritage site!). This trail involved little more than sweating my balls off until we found ourselves surrounded by about a dozen monkeys staring at us hungrily and waving their opposable thumbs around to show us they meant business. Being accustomed to stupid tourists, the monkeys remained focused on our hands, since in all their past experiences, food occasionally was produced from hands. We did not fall for this. The male leader monkey quickly got bored of us, walked over and gave the business to the female monkey of his choice. I nearly fell over.

I do not have photos of this spontaneous act of monkey sex. Don’t even ask. Even if I did, what sort of blog would this be if I published that type of imagery?

Then we continued along the trail and I nearly fell over again when I saw a leopard about to be eaten by a Komodo dragon! In reality, it was only a sleeping housecat, and a giant monitor lizard.* But these crazy lizards were about 4 feet long and did not even notice me. They had no opposable thumbs, but they also had no natural predators. So they just stared at me and walked past. Thank god no one was giving those goddamned animals any booze!

Eventually we took a boat trip through the Underground River. I don’t remember much about the river though. I couldn’t stop thinking about what horrible things were going to happen when those crazy monkeys got a hold of those god-damned reptiles.

The pics of the craziness

* No housecats were harmed in this blogging episode. I honestly don’t know why.