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Four or five days ago at the Costa Verde Hotel, the monkeys arrived at 5 p.m. I watched them hop on the bar and try to steal bananas off the counter. I took pictures of them lounging in the chair next to me.

I have since found this to be a reliable place to see the endangered squirrel monkeys (monos titis) in the evening -- at 5 p.m. on the dot, actually. When I wondered why that was, I learned from a woman in another nature reserve that there was a time when they used to feed the monkeys at that hotel. They stopped a long time ago, but the monkeys have never forgotten it, and still come back for food.

All over Quepos and Manuel Antonio, you can find signs listing "seven reasons not to feed the monkeys." They become dependent on human food, which makes them aggressive; white bread and french fries aren't good for them (and neither, as it turns out, are too many bananas); it pulls the monkeys into human territory where they're more likely to get hit by cars and electrocuted. They do a better job here of raising public awareness about animal feeding than most national parks do in the U.S. -- I've seen more people feed coyotes in Joshua Tree than I've seen tourists here feeding monkeys. In fact, I haven't seen any.

Last night, however, I was considering staying for the night at Hotel Villabosque, a little place right on the boundary of the national park, where I'd seen sloths and iguanas. I climbed up to their balcony in the evening, and the monkeys were plentiful and wild. I expected them to be scared of me, but instead it was the other way around -- there were so many of them I couldn't get back down the stairs, and only narrowly escaped one that was aiming to jump on my head.

When I finally got downstairs, I asked the bartender whether there was ever a problem with the monkeys. Do they bite? Do they land on humans? "There's no problem," he told me. "They land on you sometimes, but it doesn't hurt and they never bite. When you feed them, they will sit on your arm."

A few minutes later, I went back upstairs to watch them, and saw this bartender with a bag of bread in his hand, surrounded by a flock of monkeys.

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