Close your eyes and try to envision a golden monkey in your head – no peeking.
What image came up? I have a degree in Primatology and while I had heard of Golden Monkeys, I still failed to come up with a clear impression of what they look like. Perhaps it’s because Golden Monkeys are one of Africa’s rarest primates, found only in the bamboo forests of the Virunga volcanic mountains.
I had just had my most EPIC day the day before observing Mountain gorillas in the same park and while I was looking forward to seeing the Golden Monkeys, my enthusiasm couldn’t compare to what it was for the gorillas. It didn’t help that it was pouring rain as you can see from how wet the monkey’s fur is in the photo below.
The troop of Golden Monkeys in Volcanos National Park is habituated in theory - meaning they are used to people. From my observations, I would say they were semi-habituated. Despite being just the tracker, guide and myself, the click of my camera would send them scrambling further into the already dense forest. Trying to get photos of monkeys scattering up higher on bamboo, in the rain and having more rain scattered onto my camera lens from the tree branch above every time they jumped off….well lets just say that the Golden Monkeys were not the easiest subjects to photograph. Fortunately after about 30 minutes they seemed to adjust to our presence and became less skittish.
Just like the gorillas, the Golden Monkeys were also eating bamboo shoots and getting drunk (who knew!) but I can’t say that I witnessed any outlandish behavior or have any really good stories about Golden Monkeys (unlike my gorilla story) getting drunk unless observing Golden Monkey sex counts. Don’t worry there are no photos of it in this post, a travel blogger does have her limits! Having said that I really enjoyed the opportunity to get THISCLOSE to one of Africa’s rarest primates – even in the pouring rain:
A very wet Golden Monkey.
Golden monkey eating a bamboo shoot and getting drunk.
Multi-tasking Golden monkey eating on the run
