The Monkeys of Bara Beach

They are moor macaques — Macaca maura — and they live nowhere else on earth. The species is found only on the south-western peninsula of Sulawesi, and it is listed as Endangered: the population has fallen by more than half in three generations. The published range of the species begins here. Not near here — here. It runs from Bonto Bahari, the district this hotel stands in, north to the Tempe Depression.

This surprises people who have met monkeys in Bali. These are shy animals. They have not learned that humans mean food, they do not approach, and they do not beg. Walk towards one and it will be gone before you have decided what to do with your camera. That is exactly how they should be, and it is easier to lose than to get back. A macaque that comes to associate people with food stops behaving like a wild animal, starts turning up where it is not wanted, and eventually becomes somebody's problem. The best thing anyone here can do for them is to remain uninteresting.

Shy of people is not the same as shy of an unattended plate. They are clever, they are quick, and they have had plenty of practice — kitchens along this beach are behind mesh for a reason. So: nothing left out on the terrace, the patio or the windowsill. Not overnight, not while you swim. It will go, and you will not see it happen.

Food is the smaller problem. Rubbish is the larger one — not everything thrown away around here leaves the area, and where it ends up in the forest, the macaques go through it. It's one more reason we ask guests to keep their own rubbish secured rather than left out.

Sulawesi's wildlife is strange even by Indonesian standards. Around here there are also bear cuscus — a marsupial, in the trees, entirely unbothered — and the Celebes warty pig, which is endemic to this island and has the odd distinction of being the only pig besides the wild boar that people ever managed to domesticate.

A short way west of us, down the Makassar Strait, runs the Wallace Line. Alfred Russel Wallace noticed in the 1850s that the animals on one side of that stretch of water had almost nothing to do with the animals on the other. West of it: tigers, elephants, orangutans — Asia. East of it: marsupials, cockatoos — the beginnings of Australia. The islands in between, Sulawesi among them, ended up as neither, and are called Wallacea after him. It is why an island this size has seven kinds of macaque found nowhere else, and a marsupial in the same forest. You are standing on one of the more interesting edges in biology, and mostly it just looks like trees.