Monkey Tuesday! (What I saw on my trip to Kyoto)

6 days ago I took a trip up to Kyoto with one of my roommates and, well, the sites we saw were surely surreal. The headline should clue you in to what I’m talking about (I hope). Let’s start from the beginning.

We’re at Kyoto (京都) last Wednesday so we can see some temples. While looking at the map, we see Iwatayama Park; the picture next to the park has a monkey. We decide that we’re definitely going to see that. We had bus passes so we took the long bus ride from Kyoto station all the way out to Iwatayama park. Since I’m making this post, you know that the park was definitely worth seeing.

Beware the monkey ninjas!

If you want to visit Japan you can’t be a walkaphobic. Almost everything worth seeing that is outside of a city has many steps leading up to it; this park was no exception. During the walk, we had no idea what we were going to see, the path we were taking was through a forest on the hill we were climbing. However, once we got to the top, we saw the glorious bounty that was laid before us.

This monkey might look sad, but he’s really playing with himself.

Monkeys everywhere, literally. The hilltop was full of monkeys of all sizes and ages. And all of them were free-roaming, as long as they stayed on the mountain. Some of the monkeys were weird,

This monkey is eating the building… I don’t really know why.

and some were really cute.

Underneath this mat is a doorway to magical monkey land!

You could even go into a little building so that you could feed the monkeys peanuts. The older ones would get really pissed when you would feed the younger, cuter ones and not them. We were even lucky enough to see feeding time.

They’re creating an army!

Visiting Monkey Park was quite easily the best part of that day. For those that are thinking of visiting: if you really like monkeys we can go to Kyoto so that you can get your monkey fix.