More about monkeys

The monkeys fascinate me.

I have seen two types so far. There is a type of grey monkey that avoids people. I have only seen them a few times, and they keep their distance. There is another type of monkey that is brown and is not at all shy or frightened around people.
Trees and buildings and the cabels on a cable bridge across the river are all the same to them. They seem to be totally at home living around people, seeing buildings and people as just an extension of their natural environment. They are more common than squirrels in America, but they are more aggressive than squirrels, and smarter. They will steal from you.

I watched a man with a cart full of bread make a delivery to a hotel. There was a monkey hanging on a drain pipe on the side of a building. The monkey saw the bread man but the bread man did not see the monkey. As soon as the bread man walked through the hotel door the monkey was down the pipe, into the cart, getting bread and then taking it back to the roof, where all the bread man could do was yell at it while the monkey peeled back the cellophane and had breakfast.

I was sitting in a cafe with an open window eating breakfast. Suddenly a monkey hand came through the window and grabed the salt shaker. He was probably disappointed and didn't care about salt, but it was red and probably looked like fruit to him.

Hotels tell you not to leave food in the room if the windows are open because it attracts monkeys.

The brown monkeys are all over the place. The youngest ones I have seen are about the size of a squirrel with long legs. They stay close to their mothers. The adults get to be about the size of a medium sized dog. The big males will occasionally show their teeth and act threatening, but I think it is usully a bluff. People are still bigger than they are. The most fun ones to watch are the playful young ones that don't stay with their motheres any more, but play like kittens, making amazing 20 foot jumps from tree limb to roof to telephone pole as they chase each other and play.

I read in the newspaper about a town where a baby monkey got caught in an electric wire and was electricuted. All the local monkeys thought the humans were killing the baby and thousands of them attacked the people in the area.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

A blog giving the details of my Indian journey seemed like a good idea when I was sitting in Atlanta with a high speed internet connection and it was fun to play on my computer.

There are internet cafes in Rishikesh but the connections are very slow. Also, I just don't feel like sitting in front of a computer screen typing. I am in a different state of mind. I feel like wondering around aimlessly and looking at monkeys and talking to spiritual seekers and looking at the river.

So all is well, and I will enter some stuff here from time to time, but don't expect much until I get back to the USA. Then I will probably write a lot.

Monkeys, cows and an elephant

There are monkeys all over the place. They are on the roofs, crawling up and down the drain pipes, running along the cables of the cable bridge over the Ganges, hanging out on the steep bank outside the restaurant where I had lunch, and I guess there are some in the trees, although I haven't seen them there.

It is fun to watch them. They seem a lot like people.

There are cows in the streets. Everybody knows about the cows in the streets in India.

The thing that surprised me most was an elephant going down the street in Delhi. Cows I can deal with, but elephants are so big. I didn't know they came into the big cities. A guy was sitting on the elephant. I guess he was kind of like a truck driver.

I leave Tuesday

Everything is packed. Everything is done. I feel restless, excited, nervous, ready to to roll. I don't know what to do with myself. I wish I could just go get on the plane and leave right now.

Tsunami - The Horror

I am still here in Atlanta planning my trip. I leave in 10 days, on January 11. For the last few days we have all been watching the death toll from the Tsunami. The last number I saw was 140,000 deaths, but it keeps climbing. Millions of people are homeless, with no food or water, surrounded by rotting dead bodies.

Please help with a generous donation. A few dollars can save a life. If you have an account at amazon.com you can go to http://www.amazon.com and make a donation to the Red Cross with one click. There are plenty of other good organizations to donate to. Two that I think are particularly good are UNICEF at http://www.unicef.org/ and Seva at http://www.seva.org/.

I still intend to go on my trip. For a while I considered canceling the trip for two reasons. The first reason was a feeling that it was disrespectful to go as a tourist to a country where so many have recently died, and so many more will die. However, everything I read on discussions on the internet says that people in the effected areas really want tourists to keep coming. If the tourist trade stops because of the Tsunami that will just be one more blow to the local economies.

The second reason I considered canceling was fear of disease. We have all read about the great chance of various epidemics caused by the disaster. However, I will be up in the North West part of India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Rishikesh. This is almost 1000 miles away from the nearest area hit by the Tsunami, so there is not any danger of increased risk of disease.

Life goes on. I am corresponding with lots of people in India. Even in the effected states in Southern India, in those areas that had not been hit, New Years Eve parties went on with great gaiety and people danced late into the night.