Yesterday Josh met us at school and we taxied over to Monkey Mountain. The weather has cooled down a bit so it was a really pleasant temperature for hiking at 3:30. We saw a few monkeys early on but were rewarded with more than we could count when we took a side trail we hadn't been on before. We apparently found the family zone (Lee called it the Children's Center). There were moms and their tiny babies plus small, impish "teenagers" scampering all around us. This photo is an example of the sheer numbers.

It may be hard to count them from this shot (I forgot the new camera and had to use my no-longer-very-good phone) but there are 20 monkeys here. And that was just the monkeys along the path. There were also monkeys next to the trail in the woods and over our heads in the trees. We must have seen a hundred of them.

The first time we hiked on the mountain and we saw monkeys both Lee and I said we hoped we'd never lose the feeling of joy at seeing them on our hikes. And here it is, over a year later and many trips up here and we're still loving it. There were plenty of other people out hiking but nearly all of them seemed completely uninterested in the monkeys. We, as westerners, seemed to be more interesting, given the blatant stares we sometimes got. Usually a friendly "ni hao" flummoxes them enough to stop the staring but it's still disconcerting. Maybe that's how the monkeys feel about us.