When Monkeys Attack!

By Tom
Quepos, Costa Rica

To experience Central America is to experience rain. During the "dry season" it still rains, just less; now that we're in the midst of the "wet season," rain is a daily fact of life. It rains hard and long for at least a few hours every afternoon and sometimes keeps going through the night. Six years ago when I was in our current town of Quepos, it rained so hard that the streets were waste deep under water and cars were drifting out towards the ocean.
We went for a hike in the rainforest in nearby Cobo Blanco National Park two days ago -a first for Julia. The heat is bareable under the shade of the tree canopy; the humidity is a different story. Sweat soaks through your shirt, runs off your head, forms little beads all across your forearms, but it does not evaporate. It's like the air is not accepting any new applications for water molecules. Sorry, sweat, the position has been filled. When I studied briefly in college in the Amazon rainforest, the humidity caused each and every page of my paperback book to curl up into a circle one page at a time.
On our hike through the Cobo Blanco Rainforest, we got up close with two species of monkeys -white-faced Capuchians (think Marcelle, Ross' monkey from the TV show Friends) and the much larger howler monkeys. Several times a day in most places in coastal Costa Rica, you can hear packs of howler monkeys calling to each other. They sound like a large, old-fashioned two-man handsaw moving through wood...with a little bit of Tim Allen from Home Improvement doing his 'man grunt.' The howler monkeys took us by surprise; we paused for water and found ourselves surrounded by a pack complete with babies attached to their mother's backs. Luckily, they were not bothered by us because howler monkeys can get pretty scary when they're angry due to their imposing size.
We weren't so lucky with the capuchians. One of the packs got aggresive with us, shaking branches, throwing things, and baring their teeth. They put on a pretty intimidating show for an animal no larger than a big housecat. Luckily, we survived the humidity, the rain, and the monkey attacks and are about to start two weeks volunteering at a wildlife refuge tomorrow.