The tourist side of Ubud

So today we booked a tour on this Australian website called the Bali Bible, and we saw some cool stuff, but I would say it’s definitely the road more traveled that we were on. We did learn some interesting things about Bali- how it was separated from Java in the 9th century. They are currently building a bridge between the 2 islands, but the Balinese generally do not want the bridge because they think it will bring crime and congestion. Also, the major temples in Bali laid out on a map make up the symbol of Hinduism. 

We started out going to a Balinese dance performance. The costumes were amazing and the music was so beautiful, like bamboo xylophones (sorry to all the musicians reading this who know what a bamboo xylophone is called). It seems like Indonesian folklore has a consistent theme of battling evil spirits, and you can tell who is good versus evil based on their facial expressions either in makeup or in masks. The hand movements are also super pronounced and graceful… and impossible for me to do. 

Liz was attacked by some sort of large bug and killed it, so we encountered the most industrious ants we have ever seen. 

After this we went to a few craft markets. The first was where we saw women making batik paintings. This was super cool. They draw the designs with a tool that they dip in melted wax, then they dye the fabric and dip it in boiling water to melt off the wax. 

 

There were also women weaving fabric, which was also cool. They make the thread first by dying it into these long skeins and then put it in the loom. They said that one roll of fabric takes about a month to do. It looked super methodical.

The next place we went was a metal jewelry place. We saw the raw silver and how they use different tools to make it into jewelry. Definitely gives you more appreciation for how they craft the jewelry and sculptures.

Our next stop was a lunch place overlooking a beautiful landscape of rice fields. I had the best latte of my life- made from taro root- basically a milkshake latte.

After lunch we headed to the monkey forest which is basically a big park with temples in it that about 12 groups of monkeys live. The groups ranged in size from 10 to 40 and you could definitely see how cliquey they are.  They had zero fear of humans and they would just come up and touch you (although none of us). There were a bunch of people lined up for monkey selfies, a little extreme for an IG moment. The babies were super cute, they just hung onto the females belly while she walked around. 

Our last stop was to this place we called Insta-world (Alas Harum). It was marketed to us as views of rice terraces but it was literally a park that was built for all the twenty something global youth to take dating profile pics. So we made the best of it and definitely realized just how good we were at selfies🤣🤣🤣