Monkeying around on P Day

This next story is quite a good one.  It was my P-day today so we thought that we would go around Sandakan area and see some of the tourist spots.  One of the most popular spots is call Sepilok Orang Utan Rehabilitation center.  The center is amazing.  It has a lot of Orang Utans that are in the in between stages of rehab and back in the wild.  Basically it consists of taking a short hike on a plank board walk into the jungle and visiting one of the feeding grounds.  The sight was absolutely amazing.  seeing these monkeys flying through the trees so close to you, with no barrier or anything.  After we had spent our time at the feeding ground we started making our way back to the rest area we started at.  By this time all of the people that came to see the monkeys were pretty much gone, so there was only a few people left.  As we were walking on the bridge this family of monkeys came running towards us.  These were not Orang Utans, they were a smaller monkey similar to a baboon.  They were very cute, they would stop and stare at us, just a foot away from you.  We thought this was so cool!  Toward the end of the train of monkeys came the alpha male of the group, about three times the size of the female and with huge teeth.  This one was not so cute, but I decided to take a picture of it anyway.  Once it got close enough I took a picture, then I made the mistake of looking it in the eye.  Within seconds it jumped at me!  Luckily I had enough time to  turn around, so it grabbed onto my back instead of my face.  I tried shaking it off and after about 10 seconds, it was off my back, I started running and it started chasing me.  I was terrified, a monkey had just attacked me.  Because I was ahead of the group when this happened, I was able to run back fast enough to get behind the rest of the group before it jumped at me again.  Instead it jumped at one of my fellow missionaries and missed.  Now we all were about 10 feet away from the thing now.  Four missionaries, and this middle aged British couple.  The British lady was practically in tears she kept on saying "No Bill!  I won’t go any further, I’m mortified."  She was shaking so hard all we could do was laugh quietly, her husband was just laughing out loud.  After a little more of a stare down the monkey left of plank bridge and went off into the jungle.  It was one of the coolest experiences of my mission.  I can now say that I was assaulted by a baboon.  I will share pictures of this next week!