One of the great things about having overseas visitors is the chance it offers for hitting some of the obvious tourist destinations that I might otherwise leave unexplored. I’ve been here in Nagano for almost a year now and have never made the trip up to Jigokudani Monkey Park to see the famous “snow” monkeys.
Yesterday, while my step-mom, Sheri, was off lunching and shopping with a group of hung over young ladies, the guys (myself, Geoff and my father) drove to the narrow valley an hour north of Nagano to see the “Monkey Onsen.”
The monkeys live in the hills around the area, but now spend most of their time in the valley where they are kept well-fed. In the winter, they bathe in man-made pools full of warm hot spring water. Turns out they also bathe in the summer, as well, but mostly to grab the seeds that are occasionally scattered into the pool.
Since it was a national holiday, I was expecting more people. But the hundreds of monkeys easily outnumbered the fifty or so visitors. The monkeys pretty much ignore human visitors, wandering right past people. The only warnings are no touching, no eye contact and no feeding.
There is also a human hot springs and lodge about 300 meters down the valley, and on the day we visited half a dozen men were lounging in the outdoor pool in the buff, pretty much directly under the viewing platform for the monkeys. Not surprisingly, the monkeys were getting all the attention — cute, fuzzy animals are much more charming than wrinkled old men sitting in a tub.
By the way, it’s worth taking a look at the park’s website, if only to see amazingly garbled translations that end up like this:
The excrements of the monkey on the snow are figured a spit dumpling, which like adulterate sawdust and fiber, because of the monkey eats some kinds of rind and bud mainly.
There’s also a live web cam, which the little guy below was keen to appear on.
