Indonesia - Monkey Temple and Shopping

Got a long nights sleep, and woke up before my alarm. That is the perfect start to a day. The gourmet breakfast helped too.

Our first visit of the morning was a local community temple. Each community has a place of worship, and they are all similar. A large courtyard with stone figures and an ornately carved temple. This is all fenced in by stone walls with more figures and ornation. Yea, I'm pretty sure I just made that word up.

Next we visited a temple that had been dug up in the last hundred years. It had a cave, carved tunnel, with ancient relics. One of the relics was an elephant idol. I guess that's why it was called the Elephant cave. We also saw a fallen and broken Buda, and another cave.

The real highlight of the day was the Monkey forest in the town of Ubud. It was really funny watching the monkeys play on a dead tree over a water pool. The big ones would climb up and shake the small ones off by bouncing the tree. Then the little ones would cause a skirmish and the big ones would slip and fall into the water as well. I honestly couldn't keep the grin off of my face as monkeys started crawling all over me when I sat on a railing. They loved chewing on my phone, and gnawing on my elbow. The checked out all crevices, one even grabbed my lip. It was a great reminder of how much I love animals.

We spent the last part of the day shopping in the market. The town of Ubud is the art center of Bali, some say Asia. That's all cool I guess, but I was interested in the ENO style hammocks. I bought 10 for Kevin's family and 3 for mine. They were about 10 dollars for the double nest ones, a little less for the single.

Lunch was amazing. I followed Dr. Snyder and his family to a little hole in the wall. Down a little side street a few houses, and the prices drop 50%. The food was genuine Indonesian food. It was the best meal I have had this trip. And it cost less than 5 dollars.