Little monkeys of Colombia don't have rabies


More from the Carribean coast of Colombia. This is Moñitos ("little monkeys") - a very small town where everyone knows each other and zooms around the dirt roads on motorbikes. My very good friend, Kevin, suggested I go there to discover a rarely visited part of Colombia.

There are no tourists in this place. In fact, there is only one other foreigner there: Frtiz, from Switzerland. Seeing that I was a foreigner, everyone kept telling me, "There´s a Swiss guy who lives here." I eventually met him on the street - it's a very small town - as he was the only person besides me who didn't look Colombian.

We approached each other and I said, "You must be Fritz, from Switzerland. You've been living here from 8 years and you have a little son."
"You must be the Australian photographer," he replied.
The people don't really do very much in Moñitos, as a result they gossip and talk about everyone else's business. They had all seen me with my camera and hence word got around that I was an Australian photographer. Small town phenomenon!


[Above and below] The main road


[Below] Everybody gets around on motorbike. I even saw an 11-year-old girl in school uniform driving her little brother home on the back of a motorbike. It looked a little strange as the bike was bigger than the both of them.


[Below] The continuation of the main road. Actually, there only are three roads in Moñitos.


[Below] Like in many small, South American towns, Moñitos has a number of street dogs. They are all very friendly but one came up to me and licked my knee while I was taking a photo. Usually this wouldn't bother me except that I had an open cut on my knee and rabies is easily transmissible through infected saliva. I popped into the hospital across the street from my hostal to ask for some advice from the doctor.
"There's no rabies here," he said. "But there is a lot of malaria."
I wasn't worried about malaria so I was happy.


[Below] The beach. The water was absolutely spectacular... in temperature rather than in color. But unfortunately a lot washes up onto the beach in the mornings. Here are some children scavenging for items of somewhat use or value. The people of Moñitos are very poor.


[Below] But they are so friendly!


[Below] Children enjoying simple pleasures


[Below] Chillin'


[Below] Like the speechless man in Paso Nuevo, this man also did not speak. Once again my impression was that it was due to a lack of education rather than physical inability.


[Below] This boy was constantly happy. Afterwards I sat down and chatted with him and his schoolfriends about life in the village.



(Apologies to the email subscribers who received this post incompleted a short while ago. I'm using a friend's tiny netbook computer with an even smaller keyboard, and I somehow managed to press Publish before I was even near ready.)

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