A true story of sex, love and lies in the jungle.
'Big Brother' meets 'Gorillas in the Mist' in this story of a young woman grappling with the usual big issues - love, sex, friendship, and figuring out what she wants from life - while at the same time attempting to conduct research on capuchin monkeys, shoot a documentary and not get herself killed in the jungles of Costa Rica.
At the end of a dysfunctional relationship, Vanessa Woods left her Pleasantville life in the leafy but safe suburbs of Canberra and headed for the remote, wild and distinctly unsafe jungles of Costa Rica. She had a research job, a contract with Disney Channel and would spend the year working with a small community of dedicated like-minded scientific souls researching the behaviour of capuchin monkeys while making a documentary about Costa Rican wildlife. Or so she thought.
As it turned out, she was stung so often by wasps and killer bees she developed a lethal allergy, and the monkeys were evasive, mean and aggressive - with the only difference between them and her housemates being that at least she could tell her housemates apart. Over the course of a wild, tumultuous year that can most accurately be characterized as Dian Fossey meets Big Brother, Vanessa learned that not all monkeys - or people - are alike, that friendship can be more important than sex, and that sometimes it takes a brush with death and an abscess the size of a melon on your head to make you realise that being pretty isn't always enough.
