Ubud and the Monkey Forest

Our internal clocks still on Pacific Standard Time, we woke up at about 6 the next morning eager to get a look at the setting that we had only guessed at late the night before. The villa consists of two floors in a garden courtyard complete with an ancestral temple. The ground floor has a kitchen, living area and outdoor bathroom straight out of an Architectural Digest magazine. The upper floor is a larger master bedroom with high Balinese ceiling and balcony. Even niftier than the bathroom, the villa has a tower accessed via an external catwalk-stairway from the upper bedroom. The tower looks out on the surrounding rice paddies and countryside and is just big enough for a king size mattress.And that was our introduction to the landscape--we all climbed the tower, opened the windows and watched the sun come up over Gunung Agung--Bali’s tallest and most sacred volcano. Pretty cool family moment.

After breakfast at our host’s warung (informal café) we spent our first day acclimating to our surroundings and exploring Ubud. Like the good tourists we are, we ended up at Ubud’s most famous tourist site--the Monkey Forest. The Monkey Forest is a sanctuary and temple area inhabited by a band of over a hundred malevolent, randy grey macaques. After reading stories about the monkeys grabbing cameras, glasses and jewelry off of unsuspecting tourists, we wandered through giving the bandits wide berth. Hallie in particular was quite wary of the little beasts, always making sure mom or dad was between her and the closest monkey.

We spent a good part of the day wandering the streets and footpaths through the rice paddies. We decided to take a circular path back to the villa but somehow got turned around and ended up in a village several kilometers away from our intended destination. After asking directions from some guys at a scooter shop we decided it was too far to walk back. The guys at the shop agreed to take us back to town and rounded up three scooters. Hallie, Anna and one driver took off on one bike, Court and driver on another, and another driver and I on a third took off up the road without helmets or any idea where we were going. I remember thinking at one point “how stupid is this, I just put my two kids on a bike with a guy I don’t know in a foreign country. Great Dad I am”. But all was well and it was good we did because the trip back was farther than we had thought and the day was getting hotter.

We ended the day with a delicious meal at the warung downstairs. We’ll be in Ubud for eight days.