Bijilo forest: monkeys beside the resort strip

Bijilo Forest Park is a band of coastal woodland pressed against The
Gambia's main resort mile – hotel pools on one side, wild monkey troops on
the other. We walked in late in the afternoon, an hour after standing
among the crocodiles at Kachikally, which tells you how much this small
country fits into a single day.

The monkeys came to us. Two kinds share the forest: green vervets, quick
and businesslike, and western red colobus – rust-and-black, long-limbed,
draped along the low branches in numbers that stop you mid-step. Within
minutes we were surrounded on the sand path, a whole troop sitting an
arm's length away with the composure of commuters.

The honest mechanics of the place: feeding is discouraged, visitors do it
anyway, and the troops have learned precisely what a human carrying a bag
means. Everything we had was of interest. One vervet squared up over a
water bottle with the confidence of an animal that has won that argument
before. None of it tipped into aggression – no teeth, no lunging, just
deft, patient opportunism, executed with better manners than most
markets we had driven through that month.

So you keep your zips closed and your snacks buried, and in exchange you
get extraordinary company: mothers with infants clamped to their bellies,
juveniles spiralling up the lianas, a red colobus posing on a curved
branch as if it had been booked for the shoot. All of it minutes from a
street of all-inclusive hotels whose guests mostly never learn what is
breathing on the other side of the trees.

After a first day of border arguments, ferry economics and crocodile
diplomacy, an hour of being gently pickpocketed by monkeys felt almost
like hospitality.