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Published: November 18th 2013
One of the special animals of China is the snub-nosed monkey. There are actually five species. The golden snub-nosed monkey is the most widespread but also annoyingly difficult to see, especially now that China has forbidden access by foreigners to all the habituated troups (this was the species I went to Zhouzhi to try and see and was refused admittance). Then there's the Yunnan or black snub-nosed monkey which is restricted to a small area of northwest Yunnan, and the Guizhou or grey snub-nosed monkey which is found on just one mountain in Guizhou. These second two species were both formerly treated as subspecies of the golden monkey, which is quite ridiculous if you see how completely different they all are! Down in North Vietnam is the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, and over in Burma is the most recently-discovered species (only known to science since 2010!), the Burmese snub-nosed monkey. This last species is the rarest of them all with probably less than three hundred individuals, but in late 2011 a very small population was also found on the Chinese side of the border. My overly-ambitious plan for this trip was to try and see all five species in the wild but once I got to China and discovered how things work (or don't work) over here, it seemed like I was going to be lucky if I even saw one species! The Burmese species was an immediate non-starter. In Burma it is found in an area off-limits to foreigners unless you organise an expensive and logistically tricky tour. I was counting on China for that one because there they are found in part of the Gaoligongshan Nature Reserve in Yunnan, a reserve which I know foreigners can visit. In fact the bit of forest they are in is somewhere near a border town called Pianma which I know ambitious travellers reach. However once in China I learned that the specific area the monkeys are in has been made off-limits to everybody – even other Chinese researchers have been refused entry by the person in control – and my attempts at contact to try and get in there met with total silence. The Guizhou snub-nose I am going to try for still, if I get my next visa extension, but that one is iffy as well. The mountain they are found on is a tourist attraction, with a cable-car up to the summit and everything, but the snub-noses aren't likely to be found in the visitable areas I shouldn't think. I'll see what happens with that one. The Tonkin snub-nose in Vietnam is so endangered I will have to sell my soul to somebody to see it I think.
So that leaves us with the Yunnan snub-nose. There is a habituated troup of these by a remote town called Tacheng which are fed in the mornings. I knew that tourists can get there by bus from either Lijiang (4 hours) or Shangri-La (3 hours), and that there is a lodge or guesthouse to stay at in the town. However I also knew much the same thing about the Zhouzhi Golden Monkey Reserve and that didn't work out so well! No harm in going for it though. I flew from Chengdu to Lijiang on a 6.40am flight, which given that you need to be at the airport an hour before the flight and that the airport itself is an hour by taxi from Chengdu this required a
very early start to the day! The flight cost 560 Yuan and took two hours, and because it was an early flight I figured I should be able to get to from Lijiang to Tacheng that day, which would therefore work out both cheaper and obviously quicker than the three days it would have taken by train and bus to cover the same distance from Chengdu to Kunming to Lijiang to Tacheng (trains are quite expensive in China, and just the bus alone from Kunming to Lijiang costs 225 Yuan). In Lijiang I went straight from the airport to the long-distance bus station and tried to get a ticket to Tacheng. The main problem I encountered was that nobody had heard of it. A bit of an issue when trying to buy a bus ticket to get there! Only one person there spoke some English, but they all thought I wanted to go to Tangchong which is 12 hours away in the opposite direction (luckily I knew Tacheng should be four hours or I may have ended up in Tangchong!). Eventually it was worked out that I wanted to go to Weitacheng, which was apparently six hours away. After buying the ticket – there was only one bus a day, at 2pm – I thought I might go find one of the local hostels where I could find a good English speaker and try to figure out if Weitacheng was in fact the right place. I was a bit worried about the two hour discrepancy in travel time and didn't really want to waste time ending up in some random unknown place. Just before I did that though, I found a huge display of a tourist map showing the whole of Lijiang prefecture and the surrounding attractions, and right there on it was Tacheng, just above a town called Judian. I wrote down the Chinese characters for both and went back to the ticket counter to double-check. The lady said Tacheng was the same place as Weitacheng; she also said the bus for Weitacheng goes through Judian, so it was looking good. I crossed my fingers and hoped that was correct!
You may recall that when I was at Ruoergai I went and saw an attraction called The First Bend Of The Yellow River which at the time I confused with the Yangtze River. Right outside Lijiang is the actual First Bend Of The Yangtze River! The bus I travelled on to get to Tacheng runs right up the river valley (a fact I didn't twig to until on the ride back to Lijiang!). The Chinese name for the upper stretches of the Yangtze is the Jinsha River which means “gold dust river”.
Once the bus ride got underway from Lijiang I spent the whole trip thinking that I was going to end up in some town nowhere near where I wanted to go. I had a bad feeling all round really. At pretty much dead on four hours the bus went through a tiny little town where the one English sign I saw said “Tacheng branch” . But the driver indicated that no, Tacheng is further on. We kept on going with me now
really thinking that I was going to be dropped at somewhere not Tacheng. Just before 7pm (i.e. five hours) the bus stopped in another tiny little town and the driver said this was where I get off. And sure enough right above the road was a big banner with Yunnan snub-nosed monkeys on it. It was dark by this time, so I went into the nearest restaurant and asked where there was a hotel. They pointed down the road, so I headed that way, asking along the route, until I found it. Sorting out the visit to see the monkeys turned out to be much easier than I had expected. I had drawn a couple of pictures of monkeys and I showed them to the girls at the hotel reception (they spoke no English, as you might guess if you are following the pattern of my travels), and I immediately got told that at 8.30 the next morning someone would come to take me to the monkey area, the car would cost 100 Yuan and the viewing permit 100 Yuan. The daily bus back to Lijiang was at 7am, so I would stay two nights at Tacheng. After the initial worries getting there, once I was in Tacheng everything just fell right into place.
It wasn't far at all to the monkey place. At 8.30am we drove for a minute or two down the street, turned off the main road and wound our way up an even narrower road through another part of the village for a couple of kilometres and reached the entrance to the Rhinopithecus Bieti National Park (that's what it said on the entry ticket). There is a couple of big buildings here and I think this is the lodge that most people stay at when coming to see the monkeys; probably a lot more expensive than my 80 Yuan hotel though. After paying the 100 Yuan entry fee we kept driving up the sealed road into the hills. The road appears to go for many many kilometres but we only went for maybe five before we reached the spot where the monkeys were this morning. There were already about twenty camera-laden people there, all Chinese tourists, spread up a very steep hillside on which the monkeys were. A few more arrived after me so there were maybe thirty visitors altogether. Amongst the later arrivals was a group of four elderly white tourists – they looked American – who stayed for literally ten minutes! One had a little camcorder, the others had no cameras by the look of it. I get they may have been on a time schedule for visa reasons or something, but seriously? For an out-of-the-way place like Tacheng which you
only visit to see these particular monkeys, you would think a visitor would stay a bit longer than that! I was there for two hours and the only reason I left was because the monkeys left before me!
The hillside was deciduous forest and was obviously a regular feeding spot because there were foot-holds worn into the ground from people going up and down an open section. The ground was very dry and dusty, so much so that whenever someone climbed past you a cloud of fine dust would waft over you and your camera. I had imagined the situation with a habituated group would be that the park staff would spread food about in the morning (here it appeared to be moss and some sort of peas or large seeds), the monkeys would come for the free feed, and then when they felt like it would leave and go do normal wild monkey stuff for the rest of the day. It was sort of like that, but also not quite like that at all. For a start there was a small fire burning at the bottom of the hill and another halfway up the hill, the impression I had being so that the smoke would keep the monkeys within the tourist area. A couple of times when a few monkeys wandered off towards the side a warden would rush them, yelling, and throw sticks at them to drive them back into the middle area. It was quite disturbing for me and really put me off wanting to see golden snub-noses at any habituated feeding spot. The stick-throwing only happened a couple of times but it was really just totally unnecessary.
Apart for that, it was brilliant seeing the monkeys. They are easily the most fantastic monkeys I have ever seen in the wild. They were also obviously used to the way things worked and most seemed quite content foraging around amongst the people, either on the provided food or on the leaves of the undergrowth. Their main diet, so I have read, is tree lichens, and lots of them were feeding on that. Mostly they picked it off the trunks and branches by hand or bit it off, but often I saw them break a whole branch off and then, holding it horizontally in both hands, nibble along the length of the branch just like a human eating a cob of corn. They are big monkeys, and because they live in mountain forests have long thick fur. The belly is white, the back black, and the rump has a big ruff of white fur so they can follow each other when walking through the forest. The tails are long but when they are walking they curl the tail up and forwards, so most of it is draped across their back and it looks like they just have a short really fluffy tail. It is their faces which are really bizarre though. If you haven't seen one before, go google a photo now. The fur of the face is white and they have a black Tintin quiff, the lips are pink, the eyes the deepest black, and the nose is tiny, almost just the nostrils alone. It gives them a Michael Jackson look. When you see them in a photo or in a zoo they are the wierdest-looking things imaginable, like zombie monkeys, but in the forest when they are all just foraging and playing and monkeying about, they don't look weird at all, they look just perfect.
After most of the visitors had drifted away, the wardens put out the fires. The monkeys didn't all just run off though, now that they weren't being “contained”, they just kept on doing the same things they had been doing before – feeding, jumping around in the trees, chasing each other – which really just reinforced how pointless the “containment” was. The dumb thing about it is, monkeys aren't stupid! They will learn very quickly that they are going to get fed at a regular place at a regular time, and that the people there aren't going to hurt them, so all the smoke and stick-throwing and yelling isn't in the least bit necessary.
Final thoughts on it were that it was fantastic seeing the monkeys but also disturbing at the same time and I would much rather see them fully un-habituated out in the forest even if it meant lesser viewing conditions. I was going to still be trying to get in to see a habituated group of golden snub-nosed monkeys if I could (I had recently discovered that I
may be able to get into Hua Yang by Yangxian after all) but now I'm not going to. I only want to see them fully uncontrolled out in the forest now that I've seen how the habituated groups are operated. Yunnan snub-noses are gorgeous animals, probably the Number One wild primate I have seen (and that includes tarsiers and proboscis monkeys). Really glad I made the effort to get here to see them.
From Tacheng it is going to take me two days to get to Kunming. The 7am bus from Tacheng (which picked me up around 7.30am) got into Lijiang at about 1.30pm. There was a guy on the bus with a sparrowhawk, which isn't something you see on the bus every day. Because it wasn't hooded it spent the entire trip freaking out at all sorts of things and trying to escape from its jesses. There was a bus to Kunming at 2pm but it is a nine hour ride so I wouldn't have got in until 11pm. Instead I bought a ticket for the 8am bus tomorrow morning and I am staying overnight in Lijiang. I had a flier for a hostel in town which advertised English-speaking staff (Lijiang is a regular backpacker through-point) but when I was looking for a taxi I saw a couple of nice-looking hotels just by the bus station. Who needs English speakers right? One was called the Jinwei Hotel and the other one was the Auspicious To Hotel. Both had fish tanks in their lobbies but the Jinwei Hotel was three steps closer to where I was standing so that's the one I went with.
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Nic
non-member comment
Toby!
I saw the pics and was going to call them a Toby. But they're too cute, seems a bit mean really. ;)