Formosan Macaques (台灣獼猴)

Today my parents and I went on yet another bus tour. The selling point of this tour was to see the famous Formosan Macaques on the Miaociankeng Trail (南投受天宮廟前坑步道) if we were lucky. According to the Tourism Bureau:

“Formosan Macaques (Formosan rock-monkeys), belong to specific wild and endangered mammals, come and go unexpectedly alongside of this trail. Their appearance would be your most fortunate moment. Then if you wouldn’t mind stop for a while to watch what they are doing, you will certainly find unexpected rewards and surprises.”

Hmm, my “most fortunate moment?” Somehow I doubted it, but it certainly would be cool to see it.

We entered the trail from the temple (南投受天宮) side, which was blocked by the infamous yellow “Do Not Enter” tape due to the mass wasting (土石流) problem. In fact, the reason why they rebuilt the temple from the ground up was because of it. And what did everyone do? Going straight to the blocked area, of course! The stairs felt a lot like the paths on Berkeley Hills but worse; a lot of steps were tilted at various dangerous degrees that it was best not to go on the trail from this end. Now you were warned.

After passing the dangerous steps, it was killing downhill stairs. That’s right, down, down, down… all the way down. Not until we reached the final 1/4 of the trail that it finally became more friendly to my wobble knees. Other than that, the scenery was quite pleasant.

By now we had been exhausted and started wondering about if we would ever see any monkeys after all… Then a few people came from the other direction told us that they just saw quite a few monkeys. That was very encouraging to our tired souls! As we kept on going, a huge crowd blocked the trail and everyone was excited and happily yelling at the woods.

Sure enough! About 20 to 30 monkeys hanging on the bamboos, the trees, and the ground, busily eating bananas and other food provided by the excited tourists. There was several signs alongside the trail warning visitors not to feed wild monkeys, but no one seemed to pay them any attentions. *sigh*

A video clip of the monkeys: