Scott and Sophie Love to Travel

On our second day in Bali, we stayed close to the hotel. We found a laundry service in an alley down the street that did our laundry for 20,000 rupiahs per kg. We had 6 kilos, so our bill was 100,000 (about $6.50). Not bad for having a week’s worth of clothes washed, dried, and folded!

As we left the laundry, we came across a bunch of monkeys crossing the street and looking for mischief. Most of them were above us on the roofs and power lines, but some were coming down looking for food or other interesting stuff. The shop keepers quickly got after them trying to chase them away.

We continued down the road towards the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary. We thought this was just going to be a place to see more monkeys, so we were in for a surprise to find it was also an old sacred temple built in the jungle. There were incredible temples and strange statues everywhere, giant trees and vines, a deep ravine with a water temple at the bottom, and of course, many, many monkeys.

We were warned not to interact with the monkeys or try to feed them. They can get agressive if you make direct eye contact with them, or try to interact with them. They did have handlers around that you could pay to take a selfie with the monkeys. They would continuously feed the monkeys corn while the monkey sat on your lap for photos. We decided to pass on this.

Many of the religious statues here were pretty weird. The temple was dedicated to the god Shiva, and there were some pretty, um, inappropriate statues in some places. We really enjoyed exploring the forest and seeing all the monkeys.

For supper we tried a Balinese specialty called Babi Guling, which was a suckling pig roasted in banana leaves. The dish included several different cuts of the pork prepared in different ways with Balinese spices: blood sausage, crispy pork skin, pork sausage, pork loin, and rice of course.

We then went to a Balinese dance performance in the Ubud palace. This was an hour-and-a-half show that was kind of like a theater performance as it acted out an ancient fairy tale. Balinese dance is like nothing else. The dancers are constantly using their fingers, toes, eyes and facial expressions to add to the story telling. It was incredible to watch everything going on. They were accompanied by a large orchestra playing the traditional instruments called Balinese Gamelans with hammers and mallets throughout the entire performance.

We used our third day to rest and catch up on some writing and trip planning. We picked up our laundry, did some shopping, hung out at the pool and tried some more Balinese food for supper that night. Bali was not exactly what we were expecting. It was a little more bustling and rougher around the edges than we thought it would be. I think we were expecting Bali to be a little more rural and bucolic. We also weren’t expecting all the strange statues, temples and shrines everywhere. Our experience may have been different had we stayed elsewhere or on a beach, but we had that experience in Phuket so we were glad to try something new. On the other hand, the people were very nice and welcoming, and beautifully dressed in their traditional outfits which they wore every Thursday, holiday and full moon days. We were there during a full moon so we saw lots of people wearing their outfits in the streets.

The next morning we headed to the airport after breakfast. On to Sydney, Australia!