As nice as the beaches and temples were, by far the coolest place we went in Bali was the Monkey Forest Temple in Ubud. This place should win a contest for most-accurately-named tourist attraction. It had a forest. It had a temple. And it had monkeys. Oh, did it ever have monkeys.
See no Decepticons? Sideways ventured out of my bag briefly, until he realized that he is small, colorful, and shiny. Not wanting to end up monkey food, he spent the rest of the trip tucked safely away.
This photo doesn't really give a sense of how jam-packed with monkeys this place was. Seriously, there were monkeys everywhere, whole families of them. Far from being afraid of humans, they are super-aggressive, and will literally jump on you and CLIMB YOU if they think you have food. There were women selling mini-bananas at the gate, for feeding the monkeys; I bought a bunch, and spent the next half hour trying to find ways to sneak single bananas out of my bag while not catching the monkeys' attention. I was only partially successful. A few times I unzipped my bag and suddenly had a furry grey friend clinging to my chest. And by "friend" I mean, of course, "disease-carrying beady-eyed tooth-beast." Once I got ambushed by a group of about five of them, and literally had to run up an old staircase to get away.
Wikipedia says this place has about 340 monkeys, but it felt like waaaay more. Apparently the type of monkey is a "Crab-eating Macaque"... which is weird, because Ubud is inland. Maybe they eat tree-crabs? Or maybe they subsist solely on bananas pilfered from terrified Western tourists.
While the adults are distracted, I think we're witnessing some sort of shakedown happening with the adolescent monkeys on the left. I assume this is the monkey equivalent of "give my your lunch money, geek!"
Boy they look so peaceful and cute when sleeping, huh? Like little furry old men. Then they open their mouths and you realize these things have teeth like freaking timber wolves.
Hey kids, can you spot which are the real monkeys and which are the statues? Here's a hint, the real ones are the ones leaping on you and clawing at your face.
Anyway, face-clawing aside, the Monkey Forest was AWESOME. I highly recommend it if you go to Bali. You might want to bring some pepper spray.
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