February 6, 2004

Right, another day, another adventure.

This time it's the turn of Ubud, so we got up around 8.30, and were picked up from the hotel to be taken to Perama, then we hopped onto a bus up to Ubud.

It was pretty funny in the van, sitting behind a couple of Japanese girls who spent pretty much the whole time putting on make up, then some Swedes got on with a cute little baby, sending the girls into fits. I translated what the girls were saying for the swedes, I know very little Japanese, but it turned out I knew enough, as they pretty much limited themselves to squeeling "kawaii" in an extremely high pitch.

The bus was a bit less fun than the van, what with no airconditioning, but at least it didn't take too long.

Arrived at Ubud, about the midpoint of the island, and got off the united nations of bus to walk a short distance up the road to... The Monkey Forest.

This place is entirely different from where we met our first monkeys the other day, for one thing you have to pay to get in (only about 10,000 each) and far from being on the side of the road, here they live in a forest with paths and carved statues all around the place (and temples, as you'd expect in Bali).

The monkeys are very cute, with baby monkeys riding around clinging to their mother's belly, etc, funny little fellows.

There was an amazing carved bridge, deep in the forest, made of to giant snake dragon things, over a deep ravine with a river runnning through it, over the bridge was another temple, and more carved statues of bald fat monks, dragons, and a large fishpond.

The trees had many vines growing from them, which have been guided along cables to the ground to form a canopy. It's very cool. We took photos which simply won't do it justice.

Leaving the Monkey Forest, we walked up Monkey Forest Road, and into Ubud itself, it was heading for 1pm by this point, so we decided lunch was in order, found a lovely place called "Lotus Lane", don't think it was a reference to Superman though -- funny thing, there are loads of references to Spiderman, all over the place, from spraypaintings on walls in Denpasar, to t-shirts, and such like, just something I noticed.

Claire had an assortment of Indian vegetarian dishes, and I had an ok pizza and a couple of cold drinks.

Decided to have a look at the Ubud central market (there isn't a hell of a lot else to do, really) the market was really more of the same after Kuta and the big market at Denpasar, so we got bored quickly. Walking back down Monkey Forest Road I spotted some weird Santas, which seemed somewhat incongruous in Bali, so I snapped a picture, I had to be quick (ie. avoid getting the shopkeeper excited) so I didn't get the full range of them, but it's a nicely representative sample. :)

We had considered staying up here for a night, but after visiting, and discovering that what there was to do could be done in the space of a few hours, we decided to head back and jump a bus back down to Kuta, so I had a drink, took a few photos of dogs, and that was Ubud.

Getting back to the hotel we were pretty tired, so we went around the corner to Shinta's Warung for dinner again, I had the same thing as last time - Tuna Steaks. They're really good. Really really. Especially for 12,000 or 18,000 or something, yum yum.

It's really nice at Shinta's Warung, more like sitting in someones great big lounge than sitting in a restuarant, wonderful.

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