8. Ubud

Today we got up and headed to The Sacred Monkey Forest. It was a mile or so walk from our Homestay so we had an opportunity to explore Ubud on the way. We headed down looking in all the quirky shops along the way, we wish we had more money and space in our bags to buy more souvenirs but we must refrain as we still have some of the trip left. We finally arrived at the Monkey Forest, as we walked in there was monkeys literally everywhere... Funnily enough 😂. Within about 2 minutes I was trying to photograph a monkey and another (wet & skanky) Monkey decided to jump onto me and start ramsacking our rucksack. I quickly became the entertainment of about 30 people all surrounding me taking photos. Great start 🤣. The monkey found some food and quickly ran off with it🐒. Weirdly I was told off by the staff as apparently my bag excited the monkey. Despite many people carrying their rucksacks in. We carried on through the forest and I felt incredibly jumpy after this, we saw thousands of monkeys all ages and loads of babies which was cute. However some Monkeys werent very nice and saw 1 person scratched by one and another who had been bitten. The Monkeys were aggressive and made you feel jumpy to be around. After an hour or so we made our way to the exit, relieved to have not been bitten. It was cool to do, but not 100% sure it was an enjoyable experience 😂.
Afterwards we were heading to the Ubud Palace, Bali interestingly has 8 Kings, in different regions and this was site of the King of Ubud. The palace was gorgeous itself and felt very traditionally Balinese in the way it was designed. We explored here for an hour and as we were leaving we were offered tickets to a traditional Balinese fire dance. We obviously brought 2 as this sounded ace. That evening we had some lovely Indonesian food and then headed to the show. It was set in a temple and felt very authentic and cultural. The lights dimmed and the fire was blessed before the show. All of a sudden about 150 topless men came out and started chanting around the fire, they were narrating a historic events, which due to being Balinese we didn't really understand but it was so enjoyable and it felt like we had stepped back in time 500 years. There were monkeys costumes, Kings and ladies in traditional Balinese outfits. The show was ace and you were completely obsorbed by what was going on. Towards the end of the show, the fire was knocked over spreading the coals everywhere, out came a man with a straw skirt and a horse head (don't worry Rosie it wasn't real). He proceeded to kick the coals around barefoot and ended up sitting on his bum on the coals whilst shuffling about. He also then ate some coals whilst spitting the embers everywhere, he looked like he was in genuine pain but carried on anyway. It was such a finale to the show and was like nothing we had seen before. It was so cool! We headed back to the Homestay as we had another busy day tomorrow. What a great day, Ubud is so much more like we imagined Bali to be.Read more