Can Gio: Monkey Island and the Mangrove Forest

This was a trip I took on my birthday.  I really could not have asked for a better birthday gift then travelling to an island filled with monkeys.  I was so excited!  Can Gio is home to the mangrove forest biosphere reserve listed by UNESCO.  There is again terrible tragedy related to this forest.  I will get the bad stuff out of the way first and then move on to the Monkeys.

This forest now taking up an area of almost 76000 hectares, was almost completely burned down by agent orange during the Vietnam war.  Thanks to an incredible effort by the people of Vietnam and the Vietnamese Government the forest has almost been completely replanted.  It has incredible biodiversity value and the people who live there have a rich history and culture.

There is a lot of pride from the people for defending against the american forces.  They were bombarded by ships, tanks, and airplanes during the war and managed to fight off many.  We had the eldest man in the village talking to us about the war.  It was so crazy to have translated to us his story of what happened knowing that he had lived through all of it.  The people of this forest were forced to basically live in the water amongst the crocodiles and filth to hide from the Americans while being attacked.  To know that this man in front of me had endured such hardship made me cry, it is so hard to be faced with that kind of thing so closely.

The people would swim amongst the network of rivers and channels for days.  If they came up against the crocodiles they would have to wrestle them.  We were told that the crocodiles did not fear the death around them during the war and would eat the bodies of fallen soldiers.  Needless to say this painted a very vivid picture.

The people would use these structures to catch rain water for cooking and drinking.

This statue commemorates an american ship that the people managed to bomb.  Again sadness for both sides.  The statue also seemed to be a tribute to the fallen Vietnamese.  Despite the fact that the people killed so many of the people from "my" country, I honored their bravery and courage.

I put my in quotes because I am really feeling conflicted about what it means to have a country.  I feel so much that I got very lucky about where I was born and I am so thankful for that.  At the same time I feel that we have to drop all feelings of nationalism and defensiveness about our country if we ever hope to have global peace.  I feel like we need to be able to say to ourselves that this whole world is our world and feel compassion and love for all the people on it, from the US to Vietnam to Libya to Japan to Tibet and everywhere else.  Another thing that often brings this thought to mind for me is the fact that littering is very popular in this country.  I believe just from a lack of awareness.  I have seen many of my fellow American students taking part in this, maybe they are of the "when in rome..."  mentality, maybe they do it in the US too I don't know.  The way I feel however is that this is my world, it may not be my country but it is still my world and if it is not OK for me to litter in the US because it hurts the environment then the same applies here.  It sounds obvious when I type it out and when I think about if I had read about something like this from the US, but being here really makes me think about it.  I think that we need to respect our world no matter the customs or practices of individual places in the world.

So that is what this past trip made me think of now on to the far happier part....the monkeys!

What follows will just be a bunch of monkey pictures because they are wonderful.

 Being here and watching the monkeys interact made me desire more then ever to spend lots of time with groups of primates at some time in my life.  I have always enjoyed going to a party or being in a group and watching humans interact and monkeys are not very different just far more explicit in their desires.  I think language and self consciousness from cultural norms has made humans interactions far more roundabout and less straightforward.  One moment in particular was very interesting.  There started to be commotion and fighting amongst maybe 10 monkeys.  They were running around and fighting.  I couldn't really figure out why.  Then it all stopped and there were two interacting in a corner.  One looked like it was being gentle at first then made the other one have sex.  So stress commotion and then sex.  I don't know if there is anything to it but it seemed that two having sex caused much strife in the whole group.  It is odd cause I feel like I can intuit far more about humans because I share in their motivations and desires so I can get a better idea about what they might be thinking.  But in monkeys it seems like you see very much more obviously the result of all these motivations.

I love watching groups of primates human or otherwise and I cannot wait until get to a point in my life where I can go off and do more of it.

We also went to the beach on this trip but it was fairly unremarkable. The food was good and the sun was nice but no deep observations.  It was nice to just relax after the long day.