My, my, what marvelous monkeys!

Today, I went to Bukit Timah with my friend Erika, who is also doing research in Singapore for the month of January.  Bukit Timah is a nature reserve and also the highest point in Singapore, standing tall at 163.63 meters (not metres!).  Don't be fooled though... I mentioned previously that there is really no such thing as "rural" Singapore and I stand by that, because directly across the road from the nature preserve is a mall, and the whole area is surrounded by housing developments.  Here's the hill, looking back at it from the mall:

And here's Erika checkin' out the rain forest

There were a lot of really tall steps to climb (the trail went up and down at least 6 times on the way to the summit).

Of course, we saw some more critters today too.  Here is a monitor lizard.  They're pretty big, about 18" long.

The real highlight of today, though, was that we saw so many monkeys!  They were soooo adorable (mostly fairly small) and they came so close to us.  But I do not wish to catch dengue fever so I did not touch any, and nobody needs to panic.

This one was carrying a baby!  AWwwwwWWWw!!!

Same one, with the baby.

I also took a couple of video clips, so you could see how amazingly cute they are.  I didn't compress them or anything, so sorry if it takes a while to load.

[Video 1, 8.2 Mb, .avi][Video 2, 24.3 Mb, .avi]

Teehee!  Ah, it's a shame tomorrow is Monday yet again...