Bali - Day 4 - Monkey Forest

Today's main adventure was to see the monkeys. Monkey Forest, not far from the center of Ubud was quite a surprise. Even as we were driving up, a few stray monkeys were wandering the road. And once we payed the $1.50 entrance fee, we were all but swarmed by them. The preserve is home to 3 types of long tail monkeys, though they all looked about the same to me. Just a few paces into the park we had to drop all our bananas because we were being hounded by the aggressive monkeys...they could smell the bananas and they could smell the fear on us.

Even after giving up the food, Max got into a couple of teasing matches with the monkeys and Buz had a water bottle swiped from his hand. But for the most part, we just wandered among the thousands of monkeys amazed by their playfulness, closeness and quantity. If you're ever in Ubud, this should be a must see experience.

Another interesting thing happened while we were at the preserve when meme was swarmed not by monkeys, but by a class of 14 year old students who were wanted to practice their English with her. With their teacher's prodding, the shy students began asking questions in English like, "Where are you from?" or "What is you favorite Bali souvenir?" Meme was glad to oblige and spoke with them for 20 minutes and seemed to get a kick out of it, though the smiles on the students faces seemed to show that they probably got even more pleasure out of it.

Besides two more excellent meals in Ubud, most of the rest of the day was spent back at the Villa, swimming, reading and relaxing. However we were interrupted by planned rolling blackouts and spent a short time in the peaceful dark listening to the frogs in the rice paddies with their noisy, nightly cacophony.