The Circle of Life

 

(this photo is only minimally relevant to the blog post because Chuck is eating breakfast in it, but I just had to post it because her face is priceless)

Here we were, enjoying breakfast by the river after a night of camping, when...

This fellow joined us from upstream:

He sauntered out of the water:

And hung out for a bit:

Then we noticed these guys approaching from all sides, determined to get some of our delicious breakfast:

Then, to complete the jungle scene/circle of life/what have you, Jackie (remember her? she likes holding hands?) and baby took up a riverside seat:

We were kinda hoping for some sort of 3-way, interspecies fight club to commence, but things remained peaceful:

Aw, how cute are Jackie and baby?

The only shenanigans occurred when Jackie decided to make a move on our kitchen tent (although her plans were quickly foiled by Simon):

All the while, Tim ate fruit from this, the most magnificent fruit plate to ever be consumed:

Bukit Lawang: Monkey Town

Bukit Lawang is famous for being located next to a forest full of orangutans, but it is also chock full of other monkeys... while bopping around town we saw troops of long-tailed macaques (which I consider to be the rats of the SE Asian monkey world) hanging out in the trees.  

More interestingly, there was also a troop of Thomas's leaf monkeys that we saw on several occasions in Bukit Lawang (we also saw a couple in the jungle).  Thomas's leaf monkeys are endemic to northern Sumatra (meaning they are unique to this area) and are pretty awesome looking with their striped mohawk hair-dos.   On our last full day in town we were eating lunch on the second floor of a guest house, eye level with the power line that hangs alongside the road, and we captured this gang of Thomas's leaf monkeys on the move:

Macaques of Tanjung Puting

Tanjung Puting was full of all sorts of monkeys and apes... in addition to the more rare proboscis monkeys, gibbons and orangutans, there were also many macaques hanging around.  This variety is the long-tailed or crab-eating macaque (when our guide told us that name, I misheard him and thought that they ate crap. oops.).  They're pretty pushy, competing with the orangutans for fruit. 

We stumbled on this group of them, chilling on near the raised walkway that leads into Camp Leakey.  One of the mothers had a little baby with her... the babies are born black and then their coat turns grey as they age:

This one macaque was pretty aggressive... I'll let the photos do the talking.  I made you a flip book to illustrate what we witnessed:

We also got to see this one take a little swim by the river's edge for a snack he saw floating by... apparently macaques are quite adept swimmers.  They like to roost in trees by the river's edge, making it easy for them to drop from the tree into the water to escape a predator or just to reach the other side.  We actually saw them doing this while we were on the boat- they dropped over 3 stories down from a tree top and then paddled across the river.

Our guide told us not to make direct eye contact with the macaques, as they see that as a threat.  This guy looks like he was trying to make eye contact with Eileen.  Or maybe she was just trying to cross all the T's and dot all the... um... lower case J's: