Baby Monkey, Definitely Baby Monkey

Over the past eight months, I have had the opportunity to reflect more than ever on the question: If you could be any animal, what would you be? The answer is easy. Baby monkey, definitely baby monkey. I don’t even have to think about it. 
 

Really, who wouldn’t want to be a baby monkey? You get to swing around on trees, using your tail. You get to take monkey-back (and monkey-belly) rides on your mama. You can eat all the leaves and bugs you want. Your mama keeps the lice off you (and keeps her protein levels up). Life is just fun for baby monkeys.

Just watch out for this guy…

Green Mamba Mama

Paradise, eh?

Just when you think it can’t get any better than this, sitting in a sarong on the deck at your beach bungalow, sipping a cold soda and looking out over the beach at your feet to the sandy blue waves at the shore, you hear a thud on the planks of the deck and look down, a mere two feet past your own bare toes to the three-foot-long green mamba that has just dropped out of the breezy palm leaves above your head to rest in a perfectly graceful squiggle on the weather-beaten boards. As you jump up into your seat, the skinny leaf-green death rope nonchalantly moseys across the sand to climb the nearest palm, under which another relaxed traveler is lounging in a hammock.

That wasn’t in the brochure… Now, where did I put my machete?