Crazy Chimps!

Last Wednesday was a holiday – Remembrance Day. A day where I understand you go to visit your ancestors and decorate their graves. I only found out the day before that it was a holiday. I never made it to the cemetery, but some friends did – and they managed to start a riot. I’m a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe they had to hide out and take refuge in a restaurant. All this before midday!

A day off warrants a field trip. We made our way out of the city; it’s always good to get out of the city. We decided to go to visit the crazy chimps on the island near Marshall.

A strange tourist attraction (if you can call it that), the island houses chimpanzees that were used for drug testing. Part of a drug trial run by an American pharmaceutical company apparently. The drug trials ended, but they still had the chimps. So they put them on the island. They continue to feed them to this day. The chimps, however, are a bit loopy, though we never got close enough to really find out.

Marshall is a postage stamp of a village with a collection of huts and moored fishing boats. You reach there on the road towards the airport and then down some dirt roads. Negotiations were something else. Doing anything here is anything but cheap; some of the money had to go to gas, to oil, to the community rep, the boat owner…

Eventually we set out on a long blue fishing boat. We could see the monkey island from the shore. It was lovely, being on the water, where the river meets the sea. We anchored about 200m from the shore. They (our boat guy and several hangers-on who probably outnumbered us) called out to the chimps, threw some bananas and plantains, and a bunch gathered on shore.

So they said it would be a 2-hour tour (luckily we weren't going too far and no freak storms...) but it only took about half an hour at monkey island. It was nice being out on the water, but actually, I didn't mind heading back. Trying to think of how they could extend the tour as we reminded them they'd told us 2 hours, they took us to a beach - where the ocean meets the river. A pretty nice beach, but I found I couldn't relax so much. Others managed to check out the waves, then it was back to shore and back to town.