The Monkey Temple

I’ve really been missing you guys, my students, but I know there’s not much of a chance of us running into each other in the Himalayan Mountains. So I thought the next best thing would be to find a big group of wild, unruly monkeys. I was in luck – monkeys are all over the place in Shimla. Our hotel warned us to keep our windows closed, because otherwise we might have some unwelcome visitors, like the one I captured on camera.



The monkey goes in...



...and comes out.



For a more up-close-and-personal monkey encounter, I trekked up a mountain to the Jakhu Temple, a Hindu holy place dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman. Hanuman’s furry incarnations (rhesus macaques) live all around the temple grounds. They’re notoriously unafraid of humans – in fact, they seem to delight in harassing their more evolved cousins. Visitors to Hindu temples are required to take off their shoes before entering, but this poses a special problem at the Jakhu Temple, because the local celebrities like to steal footware to use as toys. They’re also known to be adept pickpockets, and will go after anything shiny – like a camera or a cell phone.