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Travels with the monkey is no different.
I thought about calling it travel monkey business... but why?
Travels with the monkey is what it's always been.
It wasn't really a monkey. It was a 15 inch tall white stuffed toy gorilla. Go to our Mountain Gorillas or Our Silverback Mountain Gorilla pages if you want stories about real gorillas.
You know we're always going on about packing light... so we were a bit dismayed at first when we discovered that we would be a party to carrying this toy around. Our travel buddies brought it along on an adventure trip to Nepal, Tibet and India.
Their neighbor was in second grade in school. The teacher had come up with this idea of having kids take the toy gorilla on family vacations.... to the Grand Canyon, to Hawaii, to San Francisco... even to Japan. When the teacher learned that we were seeing friends in Nepal, flying to Tibet and returning overland back to Nepal... then tracking tigers in India, our friends got talked into bringing the gorilla along.
The teacher had made this gorilla its own little backpack that contained its own little "passport" and a journal for the kids to write in. We kept it wrapped in a plastic bag in an attempt to keep it clean. Somewhere early in the trip, we started calling him "the monkey"..... "This is travels with the monkey!" "Where's the monkey?" "Who's got the monkey?" We didn't want to lose him.
Our dismay about dragging this little white gorilla around was short lived. It turned out to be way more fun to have this toy along than I ever would have imagined.
We took him rafting Trishuli River, but we restricted him to "drying out" at our lodge with the kids. The next morning, we posed him riding on a kiri kiri with school kids as they crossed the river in the only way they could to go to school.
We posed him on a truck carrying us into Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park, then we had to transfer to a dugout canoe....
Elephants came later, but we couldn't let the monkey help us bathe them.
He accompanied us on a drive to look for tiger in Ranthambore National Park in India.... we told the kids back home he was excited to see real monkeys and monkey gods. Talk about travel monkey business!
We got local kids to write in the journal and hotels and lodges to stamp his passport.... And in one touching moment, we met a lucky little girl who had a white stuffed toy that really was a monkey.... Her monkey got to meet our gorilla and we had a wonderful afternoon with her parents. Travels with the monkey doesn't get much better than that.
We sent e-mails to the kids back home from the gorilla when we could find an internet cafe, and we had him go shopping for souvenirs for the kids when we got him back to the school in New York.
And somewhere along the line, instead of dragging along an inconvenient toy gorilla, we discovered that we were enjoying our travels with the monkey! It was a real ice breaker at times. The kids we met were serious about writing in the journal... in a foreign language.... What a great education for kids on both the sending and receiving of greetings to the monkey.
We don't advocate carrying a lot of extra "stuff". If you been reading our site, you know we always say to travel light... but if you somehow find yourself roped into something like this... relax, this kind of travel monkey business might turn out to be lots of fun.
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