I left off in the last post talking about monkeys. Actually the picture was of a macaque, but all macaques are monkeys, not all monkeys are macaques. I like the photos I took of the little guys with the crazy looking hair. What I did not like was the fact that they were attracted to a pile of trash, thrown off the side of a steep hill. The pictures I chose to include in the batch if you decided to click on the click here link were not of the trash; most of which was plastic that will not biodegrade for a very long time. It has to be said that to make pictures look good, I usually edit out the bad. Some of the macaques were not eating red flowers as I show in the pictures, but were fighting over choice pieces of crushed plastic bottles that still had some juice or soda pop in them. They would chew through the bottles to get to the little bit of sweetness that was left inside. It can’t be good for the macaques. We have to figure out how to keep the animals wild by providing adequate habitat for them and protecting them from our waste. India, in my lifetime, has become the most populous country in the world. It is a crowded place where there is intense competition between the incredible endemic animals and the wonderful people.
That brings me to the wild Asian elephants I talked about in the beginning of the last post which is continued here titled as Wild Elephants. I saw Asian elephants up close in Bandhavgarh National Park. So close in fact, that I was able to touch two of them, on separate occasions, when their mahouts or drivers had the elephants stop next to our jeep when they were on patrol in the park. They both seemed to enjoy the contact even more than I did. I have seen elephants in circuses and zoos too. They all seemed well cared for, but none of them were wild. When I told Josie early in the morning that we would see wild elephants today because I was a lucky guy, it was me wishful in my thinking, that there were still wild places in India big enough to support elephants and I would see them there in those places.
As you can see from the photograph above, we saw wild Asian elephants from a distance. Unfortunately, as they gingerly moved through the rows of the tea plantation, they were ripping up whole trees roots and all. As beautiful as the plantations were, I could not help but think the elephants were there first. I am not sure that is how the the plantation owners think. I was lucky to see wild elephants, but how lucky will those elephants be?
If you would like to see a few more images of the elephants click here. You can also see a few other pictures of scenery and of plants at a small spice plantation we stopped at as we left Munnar.