Nick Thorpe's Great Escape                                              The Scotsman

Week 21 - El Chapare, Bolivia

SITTING watching the angry sun quieten into orange over the jungle canopy, I am awestruck to find myself being licked gently behind the ears by a small brown monkey.

Perhaps Hector knows this is the therapy I need after a long day's work at the animal refuge. Or perhaps he's just trying to get hold of my sunglasses. Either way, I am so lost in communion with nature that it takes me a moment to realise that the warm feeling is also caused by Hector peeing down my neck.

This is simply part of the deal as a volunteer at Inti Wara Yassi sanctuary. When you're working with animals who have been abused by humans for most of their lives, you know you're going to get dumped on at some point. If you're lucky they won't actually fling it at you. Even then it's worth it to see them running free in a jungle habitat, to win their trust as fellow creatures, not pets.

Hector, I remind myself as the yellow patch spreads across on my T-shirt, was skinny and balding like a simian Woody Allen when he was discovered hidden in the luggage hold of a bus bound for Argentina. For deeply ingrained reasons he still has a neurotic fear of 12 to 14 year old children with crew cuts, but otherwise he's back to picking tourist's pockets like any healthy monkey.

The two of us lope down to the clearing where, in an interesting role reversal, several volunteers are sitting in a monkey-proof cage peeling vegetables, watched from the outside by a line of derelict-looking parrots.

Even Sama the Jaguar doesn't have a cage here, despite his disconcerting inclination to sink his teeth into volunteers. "His mother was killed by hunters just when he was at the suckling stage, so he still likes to chew on clothes," explains Cristel, his understanding and slightly nutty Dutch keeper, whose trousers are shredded in the style favoured by the Incredible Hulk circa 1980. Cristel was backpacking her way to Peru when she set eyes on the wildest and most beautiful animal in the refuge. Two months later she's still here.

But even Cristel doesn't stick around at feeding time. She lobs him a dead chicken as if handling a live grenade, and we retreat to the sound of territorial roaring.

Up by the bridge, Nena the warden is sitting worriedly picking fleas from a spider monkey as the night closes in. Six hours ago she sent two Swiss volunteers into the jungle with Gato the puma for his daily walk, and they haven't been seen since.

"Somebody must go and look for them," says Nena, wearing a strange toupee which on closer inspection turns out to be a spread-eagled baby monkey. "If Gato has gone outside his normal territory he might be refusing to come back."

The possibility that nobody voices is that the volunteers have prepared him so successfully for the wild that they have become his first live prey. In fact, Gato has every reason to hate humans. As a former circus inmate, his back legs were deformed from beatings by trainers trying to force him to jump through a ring of fire.

Luckily, just as we are mustering flashlights ready for a search party, there is a call from the dark foliage and Gato emerges sleek and debonair, dragging Lukas and Adrian on the lead behind him.

If Gato was a human he would be wearing a velvet smoking jacket, and accompanied by butlers. He certainly wouldn't stoop to eating them.

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Nick Thorpe filed fortnightly columns from around South America from early 1999 until his return to Scotland in May 2000.

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