Ubud

Day 1 – Culture and Creativity

I’ve given poor Glenn, our weary blog writer a break to give his a brain a rest and to hopefully catch up on the blog a bit quicker so that we can at least be in the same country/Island/time zone we are writing about…

After another uneventful breakfast but in a stunning setting (did Glenn mention that our homestay was built amongst a temple?) we said goodbye to our lovely oversized bed, hot water shower, FRIDGE, Fluffy towels and air-conditioned room and set-off for Ubud.

We’d read that Ubud was Bali’s cultural capital with artisans, dance, museums etc and being a bit ‘beached out’ we agreed to head there. Glenn had very helpfully written down the major towns enroute for me (he knows what my map reading skills are like) so that I could direct us to Ubud which was inland for about 60k. Unfortunately this well laid plan was quickly abandoned  when we couldn’t find one sign relating to anywhere we needed to be so back on with the satnav and we were soon speeding out of the congestion and through pretty little villages and passed stunning temples. We read somewhere that Bali has more temples per capita than anywhere, basically there seems to be one temple for each house in every village.

 

Arriving at our new lodgings we were thrilled to see what £13 per night including brekkie gets you!. Huge air-conditioned room, marble floors, dark wood furniture , 4 poster and hot water shower! Again it was set in amongst a temple, stunning!

 

After our usual drill of locking away valuables and securing the bags to something with a cable we headed out to explore. Ubud’s very touristy but with a nice feel, a lovely market selling lots of interesting stuff. Again we searched for long shorts for Glenn, again we failed! But we did manage to exchange our Philippines travel guide for a slightly out of date, well-worn and scribbled on book for Indonesia. Armed with our new guide we felt it was time for a beer and headed for some shade so we could research and plan what we wanted to do in Indonesia.

Indonesia is BIG, quite overwhelming to try and work out what to do and what to miss inside 2 months so we had to have a couple more beers to help us along!. Feeling excited about our adventures and seeing double from the beers we ordered what was to be one of the best meals (Shell not Glenn) to date on our travels. Some fusion lamb thing, Glenn enjoyed his but it was a bit Nuevo Cuisine so he had to have pud!. All came to a princely sum of about £25, a lot for us and well over budget but for the amount of beers, quality of food we were happy!.

 

Fed and watered we then headed off to find the cultural dancing show. Now for those of you that have been following our journey will know that we haven’t had a lot of success with these. Some fella dressed as a peacock in Nepal, and on previous trips, crap puppets, out of tune singers and bored looking dancers is the usual mix. However, Glenn was determined we would see some of the culture we came to Ubud  to find so off we went, with me dragging my heels and moaning behind him.

Tickets purchased (we opted for one with fire? The man who sold us the tickets said it was the better of the 2?) we found our way to the venue which was set outside again within the grounds of a huge  temple and after a brief exchange between myself and a fat American sitting behind us who commented on not being able to see due to Glenns size, we settled down to watch the performance.

To be fair it was good!, and that’s not the beer talking!.  No idea what the storyline was but it involved, princes, princesses, devils, a deer, a dragon and what to me looked like a badger, lots of dancing and all accompanied by a big circle of guys doing some really catchy native beat box thing with their voices, brilliant!. The grand finale was some poor old guy walking across burning coconut shells!, brilliant!, well worth the fiver!.

 

That done we headed back to our temple/accommodation to find there was a wedding reception in progress in the grounds of our room. I went off to bed (beers had caught up) but Glenn decided to go and have one final cig outside. Our room, being on the ground floor, right in front of the guests, in his underpants probably wasn’t the best display of responsible tourism J

 

Day 2 – Monkey Phobia

First cows, now monkeys!. Since the attack of the cow back in Sri Lanka Glenn has developed a slight wariness of the 4 legged doe eyed, milk giving creature, opting to cross to the other side of the road rather than risk walking past and getting another headbutt.  It seems we’ve now added Monkeys to the list too since he got chased by one on a beach back in Thailand!.

We had perused the artisans markets and bookshops, dined on their fine cuisine, sampled their beer and watched their traditional dance. This, we felt, was the culture box ticked!. The only other thing to do (other than museums and cooking lessons) was to go to the Monkey Forrest where some old temples were set back in amongst the trees.

I knew Glenn was feeling a little apprehensive when after reading the list of monkey rules at the start of the park I had to drag him over the threshold: don’t feed the monkey, watch your valuables with the monkey, don’t look the monkey in the eye, don’t go near mother and baby, don’t react if they jump on your head! To be honest, I wasn’t really feeling the Monkey forest thing myself much after reading that!

 

We rounded the first corner to find hundreds of them with hawkers clearly ignoring rule number 1: don’t feed, and selling bananas and nuts to unwitting tourists!. After witnessing one jump on a girls head and then use her hair to clamber down, we moved on, FAST!.

 

We managed to negotiate the temples and only had to run in the opposite direction once more when a family of monkeys came charging down the stairs with the two male alfas spitting and screaming at each other. All in all I think we navigated the forest and was out in under 20 minutes!.

Monkey forest done, we headed for a cold drink outside the park and then headed off to walk through the paddy fields and find some calmer surroundings. Either we took a wrong turning or the author of lonely planet has a lot of poetic licence as what we found was a few paddy fields, nothing to write home about and the walk done in about 20 mins!

 

We found a route back (outside of the forest perimeter) and as it was now around mid-day, the heat was awful, we made it back into town and up a steep hill and fell into a café to purchase cold water. Fully quenched we then decided to have a beer J and got chatting to a couple on another table and spent the heat of the day chatting to them and getting their recommendations on where to visit in Bali.

I think it was the heat (or the beer?) but when we left we felt a little dizzy so headed to some nondescript café for food before heading back to our lovely room for the night.