Five of Us Riding Nowhere: Hey, hey, we’re the monkeys (or the apes)

Several years ago, I paid a ridiculous amount of money to go to the top of 30 Rockefeller in New York, the Top of the Rock. It was foggy and overcast and you couldn’t see what is supposedly one of the best views in the city. I wouldn’t know. Today, upon our arrival in Gibraltar, we paid a ridiculous amount of money to go to the top of the Rock on a cloudy and overcast day. They say it’s one of the best views in Europe and you can see two continents from there. We wouldn’t know. What we do know is that it’s crawling with monkeys, or rather Barbary apes, and they’re all the entertainment one needs.

I was once told that if it doesn’t have a tail, it’s not a monkey, even if it has a monkey-kind of shape. No tail, it’s an ape. Turns out the name Barbary ape is a misnomer, they’re tailless monkeys, which now makes it impossible to really identify monkeys and apes with this rule. In retrospect, I learned this from a cartoon vegetable, so it may not have been true.

The first sign that good things await was the dire warning to the family in front of us at the cable car. “Ma’am, you don’t want to take that bag up, the monkeys are going to think you have food.” She chuckled uncomfortably. He reinforced that this is for real, the monkeys will get them. She didn’t look scared until the monkeys greeted her as the cable car slid in. It was like we landed on the Planet of the Apes.

The monkeys looked docile for a moment, when some guy who at first looked like a staff monkey wrangler, was petting them and encouraging one to climb on his shoulder. Then he started teasing the monkey by pretending he had food in his hand, and the reveal led to a startled face, then anger straight out of Monkey Shines. That guy got bit. The family that was warned, their son got bit. Another woman had a monkey leap into her hair.

Monkeys are not safe. Unless those were apes we saw today, in which case, monkeys may be fine and you should beware of apes. Or just trust the movies, monkeys and apes are both out to kill us.