As of last Friday, your humble Travel correspondent took leave from the Star Tribune to spend nine months at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I’m a fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism, which is another way of saying after 22 years of working, I’m a student again.

Today is Freshman Move-in Day, so the streets are filled with moving trucks and concerned looking parents. I moved into a cabin at Chautauqua Park, on a hill overlooking the city. The cabin, and the whole Chautauqua complex, are National Historical Monuments, which means that for the first time in my life, I’m living in a tourist attraction. The Chautauqua was built in the 1890s as a place for mass education and entertainment; it was the internet of the day. Here, travelers came to hear great thinkers, musicians and to exercise in the clean mountain air. That’s exactly what they do today, too. (Last night at the Community Hall there was a discussion of “What exactly constitutes a sustainable diet?” And tonight, Bruce Hornsby is playing the Auditorium. ) Tourists walk across my yard, tourists stand and gape at me on my front porch, tourists talk on their cell phones much too loudly; Alice didn’t make it to the park because couldn’t find her way out of paper bag with a flashlight.

So there’s some poetic justice involved, since much of the last 22 years I’ve been a tourist in other people’s yards. I’ll continue to blog from the Rocky Mountain Bureau here on Gaillardia (not giardia) Lane, on the same eclectic mix of topics and, on my area of study here, which is mainly on how tourism helps and hurts the environment. As always, the floor is open for discussion.

I visited a refuge in Bolivia where a woman was rehabilitating monkeys who’d been mistreated as pets and circus animals in the late ’90s; one of the beautiful ironies of the place was that she lived in a cage (literally, a cage with a plywood roof) and the monkeys lived in the jungle around the clearing. She had to live in a cage in order to eat or get anything done; when she was outside, the 30 monkeys in the refuge monkeys were rifling her pockets, stealing her pens, and, peeing on her or worse. As I had my pen stolen, my pockets rifled and worse, the experience gave me a whole new perspective on the saying “more trouble than a barrel-full of monkeys.”

This is the second casting call for traveling animal stories, good, bad or ugly. Allison, thanks for the whale tale on the previous posting.

For years I’ve had a sign over my desk that says in English and Spanish: “Caution! These monkeys bite and cause serious injuries!” My dad, who doesn’t like unexpected visitors, actually found it in a catalog of some kind, and put one on his fence. He found it more effective than, “Warning, Guard Dogs.” So I was intrigued to receive the book “A Stingray Bit My Nipple,” a compilation of travel anecdotes from the readers of Budget Travel magazine. In India, monkeys at temples are known for their viciousness.

A good friend of mine from Minneapolis, Trisha Farrell, was bitten by one last fall near Rishikesh. She took a picture of the monkey, then sat down at a table to write post cards. The monkey came to the table and took her camera. When she tried to take it back, he bit her face. She needed stitches. This fellow, also at a temple in India, was more fortunate, according to the book’s cutline. The photos were taken seconds apart and the monkey didn’t pursue the hapless tourist. The book’s stories and photos aren’t limited to unpleasant animal episodes, but it has a lot of them. I’m opening the floor to any and all animal related travel anecdotes. Or anything else that comes to mind.