Apenheul

I can’t believe I forgot to blog about our trip to the Apenheul last month!  It was the part of our long weekend that I was looking forward to most, and enjoyed the most.   Better late than never, I guess.

The Apenheul is honestly the coolest place I’ve been to in this country yet.   I was so excited while we were there, Xander made fun of me because I was just as bad as (or worse than) the children.

I had no idea how big it was before we arrived.   I figured there would be a few monkeys in some cages and stuff, and that’d be all.

The photo above is one of the buildings as you get to the entrance, I took a pic of it because I loved the monkey on the side.  How cool would that be as a tattoo!

The place was huge, like REALLY huge.  It took us hours to walk around the entire place and we didn’t see everything, somehow we missed the section with the orangutans and by the time we figured out where it was we were at the exit and were both so tired we decided to leave it and consider it a good reason to go back.

 

What I loved most about this place was that it wasn’t just looking at monkeys in cages.   They were in very natural habitats and many of them were free to walk among the crowds.   There were employees of the park walking around all over the place with little squirt bottles that they’d give the monkeys a little squirt with if they were misbehaving.  

You aren’t allowed to grab or hold the monkeys, nor are you allowed to pet them.   The monkeys aren’t allowed to touch you either, although they do try sometimes hehe  We had to get a special bag as we went in that is monkey proofed because the monkeys are known for sneaking into things and stealing items from people’s bags!   Cheeky little things!

This little one was so funny!  I had trouble getting a good photo because he was constantly on the move and my battery kept dying so I was trying to be quick. OH how I wish I’d already had my New Camera by then!

About two seconds after I took the photo a boy walked over to him and the monkey tried to climb into his pocket.   It was adorable!

Towards the end there was this tiny little monkey running around with a teeny tiny baby sleeping on her back.   The battery was dead on my camera but I kept turning it on and trying to snap a picture really quickly before it shut down on me.   I managed to do it once but I would have been happier if I’d had time to get a bit closer and capture the sleeping baby’s face as well.

Seriously, I can’t rave enough about this place.   If you ever visit the Netherlands it’s worth making the trip to Apeldoorn to see it for yourself.  If you live here and have never been, you MUST!   I can’t believe I’ve been living here for 8 years and this was my first visit.   I’m already planning for us to go back in the spring when there are even more babies.

This is Jambo, the male gorilla of the gorilla exhibit.  He is on Gorilla Island with a group of females and according to the announcer for the gorilla feeding show, Jambo is still a teenager.  

Apparently he has to earn the trust of the females in his tribe so it’s funny to watch him running around and chasing them.   There’s no way to capture how powerful and stunning he is when you see him for real.  

We were farther away from the gorillas than we were from the other exhibits because obviously they aren’t the type that can mingle with the crowd.

We were in bleachers which is separated from the island by some water and I think electric fences.  It was still close enough to see what was going on though.   I kind of hoped he’d do the pounding his chest thing, but he didn’t.

These two were a riot!  The one dude laid there for ages while the other one groomed him, and he seemed to spend an abnormally long time on his arse.   Not that I know what a normal time is for a monkey to pick another monkey’s ass, I’m just guessing.   I got a video of them too but I haven’t uploaded it because during the filming my husband didn’t realize that I was recording and we had a conversation that somehow lead to him jokingly referring that I have fleas in my butt.   Yeah, I know… I’m hoping that the crowd that was around us were part of the minority that don’t speak English here, so they wouldn’t understand.

I can’t wait to go back with my new camera, and fully charged batteries!