Our first day in Ubud (where Eat, Pray, Love was filmed… which neither of us has seen) was spent re-arranging the hotel room and hunting an iron for Andrew’s Skype interview. After managing to place the only desk under the only light, and propping himself up to camera height on 3 pillows with only the top half of his shirt ironed, he was ready to go. Thankfully it was worth all the effort, and we found out the following morning he got the job!
We celebrated by taking a trip to the Sacred Monkey Forest. We’d read online that they could be mischievous monkeys, and there was even a painting of one stealing a camera in our hotel room. Forewarned is forearmed, in this case with a padlocked backpack. After walking around the whole place we felt that our worry was for nothing, most of the monkeys were as chilled as this guy.
We also found a very cool tree that is also sacred.
Plus a baby monkey.
Chuffed with our morning we decided to head back home. One particular monkey had other ideas though, and ambushed Frances as we were leaving.
Confused by her unimpressed reaction, he decided Andrew and, in particular, his bag was far more interesting. He yanked at the bag zips for quite some time before realising he lacked the opposable thumbs to use a padlock, and also the required concepts of numbers and codes.
A bit shaken up from this not so favourable wildlife encounter we felt the need to stop for a debrief. We stumbled across a coffee shop with some creatures that were to restore our faith in animals.
These are Asian civets who kindly eat and then poop coffee beans to create ‘Luwak Coffee’. Andrew sampled the delicacy and can confirm its delicious. However, the two of them will eat and drink anything they find, so they never let you get quite comfortable enough in your chair to sit down and enjoy your drink.
That afternoon we headed to the water palace and Saraswati temple. Bali, unlike the rest of Indonesia which predominantly practices Islam, has a strong Hindu culture. Which means architecture like this is fairly standard for a street corner.
The large bending bamboo poles are erected outside Balinese Hindu homes as part of a religious ceremony called ‘Galungan’ that happens twice a year. These can be seen lining the streets with offerings to the gods placed underneath them.
The next day we’d planned to get a driver to take us to some beautiful spots we’d read about. We were quickly told our plan was unrealistic and awful and that we should go to a completely different set of places. We went with it, seeing as we weren’t the ones driving and really didn’t have much choice. To be fair, our first stop was pretty beautiful; Tegallalang rice terraces.
Our next stop was an ‘extra stop’ that had been thrown in for ‘free’, that we hadn’t even really wanted. It turned out to be our favourite of the day.
We discovered that the ‘Bali swing’ doesn’t have to be a ridiculous photo opportunity and can actually be a pretty thrilling ride.
We were given a free taster tray of Balinese coffee grown on the plantation whilst they downloaded our photos. This was especially well received by Andrew who drank 8/10.
Buzzed on caffeine we headed straight onto the next place, Tirta Empul; the Holy Water temple. This is where Balinese Hindus come to bathe as a purification ritual.
After grabbing lunch with a rice paddy view, we headed to our final two stops; Tukad Cepung Waterfall and the Goa Gajah (aka Elephant Cave).
After our busy day, we were so tired and hungry that even forgot to photograph our tapas style Indonesian feast.
The following day we took a slower approach, so slow that we can’t actually recall how we spent the time. This was a tactical slow day though, as that night we were planning a sunrise volcano trek.
We were picked up at 2am in complete darkness for the journey to the base of Mount Batur. We were travelling in a minibus of around 8 people. Which is why we were pretty surprised to accidentally find an old coursemate from Cardiff on the bus. It turns out the world is fairly small, after-all.
We spent the 2 hour ascent catching up on our lives since graduation, which distracted considerably from the steep rocky climb. We made it to the top just before sunrise.
Our guide apologised to us for the ‘lack of appropriate sunrise’ (he felt there were too many clouds), so led us up further to get a better view of the crater.
We were surprised to find yet another acquaintance also admiring the views.
Luckily this time he was focussed on demolishing a packet of Oreos he’d stolen and so left Frances well alone. Given our last experience, we didn’t take any risks and left the crater fairly sharpish as the rest of his troop showed up, and started the long descent. We reckon this amounted to around 700 squats, but we were more than happy to use that as an excuse to eat our body weight in spring rolls.
That marks the end of our time in Ubud. We have since spent the last few days on the islands of Nusa Lembongan and Gili air which we will update you on soon.
There & Back Again 