I'm Back and This Time it's a Real Entry
So I'm back from the primates trip. 924 miles in five days. It was pretty intense.
We went to the Oregon Zoo which had Mandrills(!!!), which are the baboons that have bright blue stribes on their faces and red noses. If you google them, I'm sure you'll recognize them. It also had gibbons, lemurs (damn lemurs), and a family of chimps. The chimps were really fun to watch. Then we went to the Oregon Regional Primate Center which does medical research of rhesus monkeys. I don't really approve but they sound like they at least try to make it humane. They also have a giant group of Japanese snow monkeys that no one does research on, they just run around in their little enclosure. We got to see some cool dominance displays and the hierarchy was very clearly visable.
The next day we drove through a bunch of really small towns through central Oregon. It was really nice to see that there are some smal towns left without WalMart or Starbucks. Throughout the drive, Mark gave us one LONG lecture on the geographical formation of Oregon. If you have any questions about the ash layers or basalt flows just let me know. We stayed up in the mountains for two nights and went to see the fossil beds. We also saw the Painted Hills which are probably the most gorgeous natural formation that has ever existed. They were compleately breathtaking.
Then we drove up back to Washington stayed at a KOA campground in Ellensburg and saw the chimps that they have there. Those chimps are really cool because they are the first non-human primates to learn a human language (ASL) and they were brought up just like a human deaf child would be. They really love to interact with the people who are watching them so it's really fun. THey are SO different from the Oregon Zoo chimps. One really likes to look at people's shoes and kept signing "shoe shoe" at us the whole time. Then we went home. It was a long trip.
We went to the Oregon Zoo which had Mandrills(!!!), which are the baboons that have bright blue stribes on their faces and red noses. If you google them, I'm sure you'll recognize them. It also had gibbons, lemurs (damn lemurs), and a family of chimps. The chimps were really fun to watch. Then we went to the Oregon Regional Primate Center which does medical research of rhesus monkeys. I don't really approve but they sound like they at least try to make it humane. They also have a giant group of Japanese snow monkeys that no one does research on, they just run around in their little enclosure. We got to see some cool dominance displays and the hierarchy was very clearly visable.
The next day we drove through a bunch of really small towns through central Oregon. It was really nice to see that there are some smal towns left without WalMart or Starbucks. Throughout the drive, Mark gave us one LONG lecture on the geographical formation of Oregon. If you have any questions about the ash layers or basalt flows just let me know. We stayed up in the mountains for two nights and went to see the fossil beds. We also saw the Painted Hills which are probably the most gorgeous natural formation that has ever existed. They were compleately breathtaking.
Then we drove up back to Washington stayed at a KOA campground in Ellensburg and saw the chimps that they have there. Those chimps are really cool because they are the first non-human primates to learn a human language (ASL) and they were brought up just like a human deaf child would be. They really love to interact with the people who are watching them so it's really fun. THey are SO different from the Oregon Zoo chimps. One really likes to look at people's shoes and kept signing "shoe shoe" at us the whole time. Then we went home. It was a long trip.