Monkeyland and Tsitsikamma

Can you believe it - we went to Monkeyland! This was a place that had monkeys from all over the world just running around. They took people on tours through this great land and the monkeys were barely phased by us walking right by them. When we first got there, we saw a group of lemurs running around on the deck where we waited - so cool! We saw many other lemurs while we were there and they would even walk right up to you - you may not be able to see in the picture of Nancy, but look closely at her feet and you'll see one right there! The one next to me on this other deck was actually tail-less. Poor thing had lost its tail in a fight or something. There were actually two of them there without tails. Here, you can see the ring-tailed lemur, the black and white ruffed lemur and the crazy looking black one is the black lemur.












We had a really great guide named Lazare - Hi Lazare if you're reading this! He is from Congo and has a great French accent. He's going to come visit us in the States. You can see him behind this Spectacled Langur. Oh, and just so you know, I'm looking up these monkey names on their website - I definitely didn't remember them all! This Langur was the big dominant male, so the other monkeys wouldn't jump up on the fruit table while he was there. We did see other tables with more monkeys, though, including a South American Capuchin monkey! These are very similar to the Capuchins that we saw all over Costa Rica that were white and black - those were our favorites!


The Gibbon was a little more shy,but very interesting looking - I'd never seen a monkey that looked like this before.









This next one is a Vervet Monkey but was called a Blue Ball Monkey. Apparently, they have very brightly colored genitals to attract their mates, but I didn't get to see this part of it.







One of the cutest was the little squirrel monkey that we also saw in Costa Rica. This time we could get much closer, though! This little guy is also the star in a video below.








Lazare took us across a swinging bridge in the beautiful forest. He also took us by these time-out cages. He said they put the monkeys in here if they behave very badly. I thought that was funny and named them time-out cages. They also put new monkeys in here when they first bring them to monkeyland so that they can get used to all the different species of monkeys.

After Monkeyland, we went and took a hike in the Tsitsikamma park. We weren't really prepared for the hike we were going on in non-hiking clothes and flip-flops, but it was worth it because of the beautiful views. At the end, after hiking over huge boulder fields, there was an amazing waterfall on one side with the ocean on the other. I'd never seen a waterfall going into the ocean - it was great! Some people swam around there, but we didn't have bathing suits and the water was very orange/red which kept us out.