Nyepi day

As avid readers of Lonely planet, Nyepi day didn't come totally as a surprise to us. This is the first day into the New Year and is Bali's biggest purification festival designed to clean out all the bad spirits and begin the year anew. The whole island shuts down for 24hours. No planes, no vehicles and no power sources (including mobile networks down and TV signal as well). The cultural reasoning behind Nyepi is too fool evil spirits into thinking Bali has been abandoned so they will go elsewhere.

The night before this day of silence, there are a lot of ceremonies taking place in every village and town. They parade the Ogoh Ogoh through town, Ogoh Ogoh are huge statues made of paper mache, they are all meant to be scary to let out all the negativity. Apparently it takes around 2 months to build each of them! There are some that are made by children and some by adults but all look very good! We joined the mass of tourists in the main square to wait for the procession. It's mayhem, no one knows really what's going on and what's the plan but everyone is joyful and excited! Around 18h30 when it starts to cool down the first Ogoh Ogoh is lifted up, a marching band follows it and that is how this hour long procession starts!
Some of them are very tall and when you add the humans carrying it, it will be higher than the numerous low electric cables that are hanging across the roads. For every problem there is a solution and it's not the first time this happened. They have dedicated people in the team that lift the electric cables with a stick so that the Ogoh Ogoh can pass. Safety is a distant concept here 🤭
We follow the crowds for a bit longer and then decide to try to find a place to have dinner, but 90% of the restaurant are closed and the other 10% are full, so it will be pot noodles!

We had a nice quiet night and so should be our day. As we are tourists we are not held to the strict rules of the local population, we are allowed to use the hotel pool and use the lights as long as the curtains are drawn, they also fed us 3 square meals, which was nice of them. Lots of reading by the pool and enjoying the view from our balcony is the order of the day.
However, apparently the memo that it was Nyepi day didn't hit the monkey forest.... All the monkeys (that were probably not being fed) came out of the forest on the hunt for anything edible in the hotels. Let's say that the pool wasn't a tranquil spot when a monkey jumped on Armelle (maybe more on the lounge chair) to try and grab a bag we had. All our attempts to scare the monkey didn't really pay off until the security came with their catapults! More scare than hurt though. Anyway, we still managed to enjoy the pool and then after lunch retreated to our balcony for some more reading.

Unfortunately the monkeys managed to outsmart us, maybe not that difficult to do, we were sat on the lounger and had left a packet of cashew nuts on the table, not half a meter from us. A cheeky monkey managed to sneak up on us, out of our peripheral vision we spot some movement but it was too late. As we shriek at the shock the monkey, which was probably half a meter of pure muscle, very calmly, looked us in the eye, acknowledged that we we're being outsmarted, grabbed the packet of nuts and nonchalantly strolled off,happy with his haul. Monkey 1 - Tourists 0.

Silent day was definitely more eventful than we thought it would be, but also a good interlude to enjoy on our last day in Ubud.Read more