Welcome to SaruYama (monkey mountain) where all your dreams of living amoung mokeys can come true (if only for a short time)! You will see many different generations of monkeys ranging from baby to the oldest at 90 years of age!

We had decided when we first planned on going to Kyoto that SaruYama was our destination.  When we first arrived we were not entirely shure what to expect, but once we sarted climbing we found out real soon. Let me axplain a bit: SaruYama is a section of the many mountains that encircle Kyoto, a part where many of the monkeys that inhabit those mountains live.  There are no cages, bars, or protection you are totally imersed within their territory.  When we saw our first monkey, which was about 20 minutes into the hike up the mountain we were so excited!  Then suddenly about 7 of them came running out of the woods towards us screaming loadly-needless to say we were a bit scared.  But we just huddled together and they left us alone.

So we continued up the mountain seeing many mountains along the way-at first we tried to keep our distance (with the scare we had before could anyone blame us?) But we soon realized that it was impossible, they would walk by us on the path and think nothing of it-even if it was the coolest thing to us!  The only time your heart started to pound was when you heard them screeching, they would start fighting with each other and sometimes run past us-which always made your heart jump a beat!

Once we got to the top we were amazed at how many there were and the little ones running around.  Then we were informed that we could feed them-granted we would be within a type of cage when we did it, it was still awesome.  We all bought some sliced apples and fed them!  They would hold out their hands and we placed it right in them!  After a while though other monkeys started catching on to the fact that food was being served and we were a bit swamped-and we also came to notice a very distinct pecking order.

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