Qianling, Guiyang's famous monkey park

Guiyang is full of great natural beauty. The city has excellent parks everywhere you go and has made a real effort to conserve open space even as it has developed significantly over the past decade. Some of the parks are new, but some of them are quite old.

Last month, I visited one of the older ones: Qianling park, named after Qianling mountain. It's one of the most well-known mountains in Southern Guizhou, and the park itself is known all over China for its population of Macaque monkeys. The mountain is almost completely covered in forest, making it a prime habitat for them. I'm not sure exactly how many live in the park. I would guess it's in the hundreds. They are everywhere along the paths, and they aren't shy around humans at all.

This shouldn't be a surprise, since you can feed them nuts and fruit that you can buy from vendors outside the park. They'll take food from your hand, but I wouldn't recommend it. They can be very aggressive, and I saw more than one tourist run away from a screeching monkey who wanted their food, and wanted it now.

Wild animals are wild, no matter how tame they may seem.

At the top of the mountain there is a Ming-dynasty era temple, the Hongfu buddhist temple. The name means "good fortune." It's the largest Zen temple in Guizhou province, home to many shrines of various bodhisattvas and some truly impressive jade statues. The air is thick with incense offerings from people paying their respects. Photography is forbidden there. I understand why, but I wish I could have taken just a few shots of the shrines. They are magnificent, and worth a visit to the park just to see them.

I went there during a holiday weekend, so it was packed with people despite temperatures of nearly 90 F. A friend of mine came with me, and she was an excellent guide to the sprawling park. I'm grateful to have had her there, because it would have been easy to miss some of the sights she showed me.

This is the main entrance to the park. Notice the Disneyland-style crowd waiting to buy tickets and get in.
The lush mountainsides you see are typical. Nearly every hill and mountain in Guizhou has thick forest cover.

This youngster was one of the first ones I saw in the park. It never moved far from its parent, but kept an eye out for everything going on around it.

As you get further up the mountain, you see more and more of these offerings.
My friend was dealing with seasonal allergies and had to wear a mask to keep it out.
It's hard to overstate how strong this incense is. 

This is the entrance to Hongfu temple.
I know, I needed a haircut. I got one shortly after.

The monkeys are quite clever, able to open bottles that people leave around.
No one tried to get this yogurt drink back from him, which was for the best.
Like I said, they can be aggressive.

Not dead, just resting and enjoying a good grooming session.
That's the face of a contented monkey.

These two were showing off for the crowd, doing acrobatics around the fence and the trees.
I caught this shot when they stopped briefly.

They like fruit of all kinds more than nuts.
Speaking of nuts, enjoy the monkey junk.
They have no shame, really.

This guy would scramble over to get any dropped food, then run back to his tree to eat it.
He was a bit of a bully to the other monkeys, but that's part of nature.

This old one claimed the stairs as his own. The other monkeys didn't come very close while he was there.
I wonder if it was respect for old age or if he was just a mean bastard.

Shortly after I took this picture, it did take the food directly from her hand and scamper off to eat.
I saw that same scene end quite differently a few times.

Just a family enjoying some sun on the wall. 

I'd been walking up the mountain for a couple of hours at this point.
I wanted to lie down, too.

There's a decent zoo in the park, as well. It holds a number of birds, reptiles, and mammals. Most of the habitats were too crowded with people for me to get any good pictures, but I did get one or two shots of the only ones that really mattered to me.

Pandas are revered in China. It's their national animal, and everyone loves them.
This is what they do with their day. It's not a bad life, to be honest.

They're a lot bigger than I realized. I was expecting a koala-sized animal, but they're more bear-sized.  I'm not sure why I thought they were so small, and it was a shock to see how wrong I was.

Tigers are my favorite animal and Siberians are magnificent.

Qianling Hill park gets a 10/10 from me. I only spent half the day there and could easily spend many more exploring its winding paths. I'll definitely be back more than once in the coming years.