Bali, part the Second

Ubud...I need to thank my friend Meredith for recommending this city to me and my traveling companions. I don't know if we would've considered it with out. Maybe we would have. Still, she gave it a big thumbs up and so do I.

Ubud is set inland about 45 mins or so and is the Bali's culture and art center for the island. For me, this was my favorite part of the trip. We found a nice little home-stay set off the main road down an alley. The caretaker was very nice and eager to set us up with anything we needed -- for additional price of course. Our first day they we walked down the street passing all sorts of artisan shops hawking local tradecraft and wares -- things like Balinese masks, jewelry, drums, etc. At the end of the street was what we were looking for...the Sacred Monkey Forest.

It was awesome. It's an Indonesian Temple set in among the forest/jungle and totally overrun by monkeys! Think the Jungle Book. The locals sell bags of little bananas to give to the monkeys that will crawl into your lap and take them...and take other things like watches and bracelets, or the rest of the bananas if you're not careful!

The next day, we had signed up for a traditional Balinese/Indonesian cooking class. It was hands-down the best food of the entire trip!
We were given a recipe book of think five dishes (including desert) and were taught how to prepare and cook them. We cooked for about four hours until 1 pm. Then we all sat down to lunch and was served this amazing spread of all the food we had just cooked. Delicious!

Later that day, we rented scooters to explore the surrounding country side. Sadly, our high from lunch was thwarted a bit when one of our party hit a parked car with her scooter. I'm not going to name names...