Travel: Monkey Forest, Ubud, Bali

Every good traveler has a list of places (in their head, if not written down) where, if all the planets were aligned, they'd drop everything and go in a minute.  For me, for too many years to think of, Bali was at the top of my list.  Therefore, when a friend told me that he was traveling in Asia for two months and making a stop in Bali, I moved heaven and earth into alignment for the chance to meet up with him and explore one of the places of my dreams.

I had many adventures in Bali but one of the most memorable was a trip to the interior town of Ubud.  There are many small towns in Bali that specialize in some kind of craft or another - batik fabric, wood carving, stone carving, silver jewelry - but Ubud is considered the cultural capital of Bali.  Most tourists book a guided bus tour to these towns, where they are dropped off at major shops who pay the tour companies for the privilege of being on the route.  My friend and I wanted something a bit more off the beaten path, so we rented a Jeep and with our trusty Lonely Planet map in hand, set off on our visit to Ubud.

The first thing we discovered, to our chagrin, was that road signs basically don't exist in Bali.  What we found instead were signs pointing to various towns, sometimes the next town over and sometimes the next largest town.  We had to know what towns were in the general direction of where we were going in order to know which signs to follow.  Unfortunately, it took some time before we realized that, but we got a tour of the back parts of Kuta until we figured out the right direction to go.

We finally made our way to Ubud with only a few short detours along the way.  We parked a few blocks from the town center and started walking.  We spent some time wandering into shops and looking into the interior courtyards of houses, in which we found the most beautiful gardens.  Although we were really hungry and kept an eye out for a likely place to have lunch, the beauty of the town kept drawing us in.  In Bali, every house and building is highly decorated with stonework, paint, statuary and flowers, and each block was a visual treat. 

Near the center of town stands the Lotus Cafe, which was a beautiful wooden structure open to the street.  What wasn't apparent was that it was also open in the back, and looked out over the Pura Taman Saraswati  temple.  Pools full of floating lotus flowers and small fountains spilling from the mouths of fantastic stone-carved creatures created a sense of peace and contentment.  We order a plate of typical Balinese food.  Although we were unsure what most of it was - rice, pork, chicken satay for sure - it was presented so beautifully, we ate it all, followed by a cold Bintang beer (which I learned to love during my stay on the island).  After lunch, we wandered into the temple compound to explore the beauty.

Our appetites sated, we continued walking through the town to the Sacred Monkey Forest.  Just outside of the forest, we found a small building selling tickets (less than 20 cents American) and bananas.  We bought two tickets and a bunch of the fruit, which was placed in a plastic bag for us.  Through the building and we entered the forest.  Within a few yards, we came upon our first monkey, sitting on the path and seemingly waiting for visitors (actually, the monkeys are long-tailed macaques).  My friend was carrying the bag of bananas, and he reached in to remove one to give to the small brown monkey.  Generally my friend is not one who is afraid of animals - he'd been known to feed coyotes and follow a group of bears to get a good photo - but we'd been told the monkeys do bite on occasion.  When the monkey bypassed the banana in his outreached hand and went for the bag, he let out a scream like a little girl, dropped the bag and ran for his life.   I laughed so hard, especially when the monkey grabbed the bananas and settled down to eat them all by himself.

Without bananas to share, we were mostly ignored by the other monkeys we happened upon.  There was, however, one monkey who took a shine to me and climbed onto my shoulders as I was resting on a stone bench.  He was a cute thing, but his prying hands soon discovered my necklace and apparently thought it was something to eat.  I quickly removed it from the monkey's hands, but then he found my pierced earrings, and I clapped my hands over my ears to prevent them being torn out.  That was enough for me - but how do you get a monkey off your head, especially a sacred monkey?  Well, basically, you sit very still and wait for it to leave. 

After that excitement, I was happy to leave the monkeys and just explore the forest.  It truly was a small forest and just outside of town.  There were three temple complexes within it, covered with all the stone carving I had learned to expect.  As there was also a small creek running through the forest, much of the statuary was covered with green moss, giving it an even more fantastical look.  I felt as if I had dropped out of the modern world altogether and into one in which nature played a much more powerful role and ancient gods were close at hand.  That does, actually, describe Bali extremely well.  I've never seen a more beautiful place, both in nature's gifts and in the artistic sensibility of the people who live there.