So I stopped in shops along Ubud's main road, all the while headed towards the Monkey Forest. I didn't really know what to expect, I had never seen monkeys real up close before, outside of a zoo. I just kind of expected to see trees and maybe some monkeys flying up above. No, this was like a monkey sanctuary...monkeys everywhere! At first, I was a bit frightened at the proximity of the monkeys, and then the amount of monkeys, everywhere!! You could buy bananas to feed to the monkeys. I chose not to. I didn't want to get attacked! In addition to viewing monkeys, this was a very nice jungle setting as well. Let's take a look at some of my (more favorite) monkey photos, as I took a lot:
After the monkey forest, I went to my first of three Bali spas. For $10-15 USD you can get a two hour spa treatment; with massage, scrubs, and floral baths! They massage you for an hour, the put on an exfoliating scrub, like yogurt, then you get in a bath filled with rose petals and other pretty flowers...though the first time, I did feel like I was living in the middle of American Beauty...and they serve you tea and fruit or cookies, it's delightful.
After a meal, I went to see traditional Balinese dancing. The dance I saw was called Kecak Fire and Trance Dance (well, there were two dances in total, I suppose).
The Kecak dance is accompanied by the gamelan suara, a choir of a hundred men sitting in concentric circles, swaying, standing up, lying, etc. Over the chanting, a story is told by one voice. In the Kecak dance, the story is a part of the Hindu epic, Ramayana: Prince Rama and his wife Sita have been banished from the Kingdom (Ayodya) by King Dasarata as a result of trickery by Rama's stepmother. The story starts when Rama's brother, Laksmana, arrives in the forest of Dandaka. There are splendid costumes and masks and headdresses that the characters wear throughout the telling of the story. The performances is kind of a cross between theater and dance.
The Trance Dance, known as the Sanghyang Djaran, is a dance inspired by the gods, in order to protect society against evil forces and epidemics. This particular dance involves horses (Djaran means horse). The "horse rider" is lulled into trance by repetitive sounds of the gamelan suara and in his tranced state, walks on a bed of burning coconut husks responding to the rising and falling of the sounds of the gamelan.
Both dances used fire. The first, had a fire pit in the center that they danced around. The second lit coconut husks on fire, which spreads all over the dance floor. There were lots of drumming and chanting and swaying. Very different from any performance I'd ever seen!
It poured all day and all night. I'm not talking about constant rain, I'm talking about what a monsoon feels like. It rained so much and so hard that my only pair of pants were ruined for the rest of my vacation. By the end of the night I was drenched, and cold. The next day I couldn't do the volcano trekking I had hoped for, because of the weather. Instead, I took a walk to Ubud's market, and ended up bartering for several gifts to take back home (including a drum, and a tea set!). That afternoon, I hired a moped driver to take me around the island.
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