NICK: Monkey hunting in Minoh/Cup Noodle Museum
Trip Start
Jan 25, 2006
1
40
106
Trip End
Ongoing
Osaka,
Japan
Friday, May 5, 2006
The monkeys in Minoo are apparently extremely intelligent. They know how to attack in groups to steal food from picnickers, they only attack females with large bags (thinking they have food). Another legendary attribute to these monkeys is that they can take coins and put them into the drink vending machines to buy drinks.
How awesome is that?
The park was CROWDED due to Golden Week. I guess it's a popular thing to go to the hills and have a picnic and a hike
01 forest in Minoo
. It's not much of a hike as the trail is paved and cars occasionally come up and down it, but I guess it's as good as we're gonna get in Japan.
We walked about 30 mins and found ourselves at the waterfall.
Alas, no monkeys.
We went up the hill over the waterfall.
No monkeys.
Taiki asked around to see if anyone had seen the monkeys. We got an excellent lead from someone who'd seen tons of monkeys along the road.
So we walked along the road.
Probably about 6 mins into the walk we spied some hanging out on the anti-rockslide fences, happily munching away at the grass.
I snapped a few pictures and we hung out on the other side of the road, careful not to scare the monkeys.
We then noticed that there were tons of monkeys around the area
02 Sundial
. They were in the bushes near the road, further along down the road, and sitting on the road waiting for cars.It's funny how much the monkeys soon resembled prostitutes.
They sit on the guardrails along the side of the road, waiting for cars to stop and show them food. They then jump onto the car, and collect the food. When the food is gone, they jump off the car and go back to sitting on the guardrail, waiting for the next car to come along.
The monkeys scared the bejeezus out of us by walking closer and closer to us. Thinking one of the bigger males would attack Ashleigh (who was smart to leave her messenger bag at home) Taiki and I stood on either side of her.
We had nothing to worry about. The monkey wasn't interested in us. he was waiting for more cars.
Satiated with our monkey fix, we went back to Ikeda but had noticed that there were tons of people carrying Cup O' Noodles inside of an inflated plastic bladder
03 bridge
. We asked Taiki about it and he mentioned that Ikeda is the birthplace of instant ramen. He mentioned a museum and Ashleigh and my eyes lit up.How awesome is that? an instant ramen museum!!?!?!
So we walked a little distance to the museum just in time before they closed, so we got to run around for a little bit. It was neat to see the "Wall of Ramen" which displayed the various permutations of ramen that the Nissin noodle company. Unfortunately, we missed the time to create our own one-of-a-kind flavored ramen. You can mix and match the flavors to create your own variation.
Exciting stuff.
We bought souvenirs and (of all things!) instant cup o' noodle ramen from the gift shop (which were pretty cheap) and headed back to my Aunt and Uncle's house.
