Monkey Island Tour offers Adventure on the Amazon River

The sun was up, but still below the trees as the short, squarely built man cut the throttle on the small boat.  He bore no expression, his features looked much like the old totems that pre-date the Incas by a century or two.

The morning light revealed movement on the shore, as small brown humanoids gathered, adding to their numbers two or three at a time.  Some of the group stood still and watched us, while others were rapidly in motion, darting from side to side.  The tiny craft slid up onto the bank with the whoosh of aluminum on soft mud, and we stepped out.

I had never seen so many monkeys outside of legislative session.  Monkey Island, a primate refuge on the Amazon River near Iquitos, Peru, contains about 75 monkeys of various species, roaming freely, and ready for interaction with humans.

I soon met Felipe, a common wooly monkey, after he held out his hand to me as if to shake it.  Once he had my hand, he immediately vaulted up my body and landed on my shoulders.  I then began exhibiting symptoms of an interesting speech defect that only occurs when one tries to hold a monkey:  I began repeating the words, “Monkey, stop it, monkey, no, monkey, quit” in some variation over and over.  Since Felipe effectively had four hands and could hang on with his tail, within the first five seconds he had grabbed by sunglasses, my hat, untied one of my shoes, and explored every one of my pockets.  I managed to keep everything, but had I sneezed at the wrong moment, Felipe might have robbed me blind.  Once Felipe decided I didn’t have anything he wanted, he settled down and let me hold him like a child, even though he tried to bite me a couple more times when I stopped paying him constant attention.

 

As we walked along though the gaggle of hilarity, I got the bright idea that I could hold a second monkey, a spider, in my other arm.  Apparently this violates some law of quantum monkey physics - two monkeys cannot occupy the same space at the same time.  The two decided to engage in a full-blown monkey fight, without actually dismounting the human (me).  A third monkey cheered this on, and he looked a lot like Don King.

My youngest daughter, 11, was having fun of her own.  Too small to hold a monkey, she was being led around after a spider monkey discovered it could use its tail to hold on to her arm.

After a brief tour and some free time in the exercise yard, we were brought inside a small structure, where a tiny, diapered baby monkey was passed around and snuggled.  

While I could have stayed here for a week, it was soon time to stop monkeying around and move back to the boat.  I looked around for Felipe, but he had already moved on, so we headed out to the next chapter of our Amazon Adventure.