At the monkey temple

After making the hike to the top, we took a moment to rest and pick up a couple of monkey sticks. We also had a short photo session with a group of young Indian men who were on pilgrimage to Jakhu. Men, in particular, love taking photos of the white folks they come across – especially if they happen to be tall, blonde, and speak Hindi.

The monkeys at the temple were up to their usual antics: scurrying about, climbing on things, fighting over food, grooming, and napping. We had brought up a couple of chocolate cookies, and then once there, also bought a couple packets of prasad (food offerings), one of which had little white candies, the other was hazelnuts. As soon as I started rifling in my purse, we found ourselves surrounded by macaques of different sizes. I broke the cookies into pieces and tossed them to individual monkeys, while Danny did the regulating with his stick. If a monkey got too close, he tapped the stick on the ground to let the monkey know to back off. They ate everything and anything that was available, right down to the tiniest crumb.

Some of the monkeys liked eating the flowers that grew on the temple grounds. You could see where they’d been eating by the petals strewn on the grass. Some visitors to the temple brought the monkeys marigolds as offerings, which the juveniles happily held in their feet and munched on.

We spent most of our time feeding and photographing the various members of the monkey troop. Danny, being more experienced with the monkeys and therefore more brave, would sometimes feed a monkey by hand, provided that he wasn’t being followed by a whole lot of other monkeys. One such monkey was content in collecting hazelnuts out of Danny’s open palm – until I guess he got impatient and decided to steal the whole packet from Danny!

While Danny re-established connections with his human contacts at the temple, I watched a couple of young monkeys tumble about on a playground set meant for human children. They clambered up the slide, then slid back down, before wrestling their way back to the top. It was much like watching young human children, and I think, at the end of the day, monkeys and humans really are quite similar.