More Ubud June 6, 2021

On our second day in Ubud (I believe this is Feb. 2, 2020), Jill geared up for her Yoga workshop. She was so excited for it. She’d been watching this celebrity teacher on instagram for a long time. She even signed up for her VIP club because there was a big discount on the workshop. While Jill was getting started I started to explore the city. There are a lot of motorbikes in Bali. It’s the main mode of transportation for the locals and the tourists. Today, I just walked around because Ubud has many sidewalks and most of the traffic uses the main road. I walked with Jill to her yoga studio and left her to continue down the street. Almost every building is a restaurant, yoga studio, and/or a guest house in that part of the city. I walked south, the streets are pretty grid like. I couldn’t turn east because of a ravine. The ravines cause problems. There are a bunch running north to south with streams at the bottom and I’m sure in the rainy season the water gets quite rowdy. Our guesthouse butted into one. Only a couple streets had bridges over the ravines. I walked on and found a busy one that crossed. I continued on with a vague destination. Through streets and streets I finally found my way to the Monkey Forest.

The Monkey Forest is one of the most famous things to see in Ubud. Tourists probably pay a good portion of the funding needed to keep it running. Locals go there to see and pray at the many different shrines. It’s essentially a big wild park with sidewalks and more than 600 monkeys in it.

I was greeted by a large fountain and a pond full of Carp fish. In the middle of the pond I found a large visitors’ center/cafe/gift shop,  with my ticket and a map I stepped into the woods following a sidewalk. I hadn’t seen a monkey yet. A rainforest (I guess it was a rainforest) enveloped me. The ground was relatively bare in the shade of 50 meter tall trees, everywhere. Here and there were monkeys sitting or playing. There were adults and babies. The visitors stayed on the sidewalks. The monkeys went wherever they wanted and mainly stayed calm. Farther on I saw my first worker, the workers all had uniforms. He was dicing bananas into a large pile. The monkeys quickly gathered around him. They would grab some bananas and go sit down to eat. Some of the monkeys got too close to each other and they would growl and scratch but the scene still pretty calm.  Eventually the worker stopped chopping. The food supply was kept in a cage by the feeding station.

On and on my fellow gawkers and I walked through the trees. Mother and baby monkeys were certainly a Kodak moment and caused great back ups in the foot traffic. In the midst of the park was a fenced in road with city traffic buzzing by. Other places had statues and decorative sculptures. There was a small gorge with a stream at the bottom like the one by our guesthouse. A path wound and stepped down snaking around an enormous tree and ended at a shrine with water dripping through a pool. The monkeys were perched all over the railings checking out the visitors. I remember one woman who wanted a picture with a monkey. She crept closer and closer until the monkey hopped on her, she didn’t appreciate that. Wild animals aren’t too good at posing for pictures or being cute and cuddly. On and on I walked, whenever the monkeys got too fresh with anyone the workers were close by. They had slingshots and just pulling the band back was enough to make the monkeys scatter. 

I took a lot of pictures, saw a lot of monkeys, and walked a long way. Covid probably didn’t cross my mind. I think I did notice the lack of Chinese tourists.