Monkey Jungle with Aaron and Ethan

One final adventure Florida adventure: We drove over to Miami for a short visit with our friends the VanGenderens. Their son Aaron went to preschool with Elsa last year, and their younger son Ethan always loved Claire to pieces. They are now living in Miami semi-temporarily.

Elsa was so excited to see Aaron for the first time in several months, and they spent hours playing together, so nicely!

One of the VanGenderens' discoveries since they moved down there is this crazy place called Monkey Jungle. It advertises itself as "the place where the humans are caged and the monkeys run free."

Basically, you walk through a series of caged pathways, and most of the monkeys are hopping around directly above you.


There are all these bowls hanging from chains, which you can fill up with raisins. The monkeys then pull the bowls up by the chains in order to get the food.

There are also a few varieties of monkeys that are in cages, like these guys here. But you can feed them too—you just send your raisins down a tube to the waiting monkeys.

I figured Monkey Jungle would be kind of a fly-by-night tourist-trap where the monkeys weren't treated so great, but I was wrong. They actually appear to do a fair amount of research and training there. And at one time they had the only "semi-natural" rainforest in North America, with plants imported from Peru. (Until Hurricane Andrew wiped it out completely. They're now in the process of regrowing them.)

So Monkey Jungle turned out to be pretty cool, and of course the kids loved it.

Claire got a kick out of the birds they have there. This girl loves birds! Along with the seagulls at Ft. Myers beach, she recently discovered the turkeys that often hang out just outside the windows at Elsa's school. She had a screaming fit when I tore her away from those turkeys on the last day of school before Thanksgiving.

So our trip to Monkey Jungle was a big success, and it was so nice of the VanGenderens to host us. We had a great time with them!