In Soviet Russia, Monkey Shocks YOU!
Trip Start
Mar 17, 2010
1
5
22
Trip End
Mar 17, 2011
Ubud, Bali, Indonesia
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Ubud can has them.
Ubud is a beautiful little town, near central Bali, with streets lined with shops, bars, restaurants, and temples. It's unquestionably a beautiful place, especially after the hustle and chaos of Kuta. The people sit outside of their shops, wiling the day away providing services to the hundreds of midlife crisis waging women brought here by the most hideous of books, "Eat, Pray, Love", the astoundingly self-indulgent semi-true story of a midlife-crisis waging yoga acolyte who spends a month in Ubud being fucked silly by a randy old goat of a Brazilian named Felipe. Oh, and 'finding herself', and all that crap. Apparently, to a woman in her late thirties, being fucked silly is the closest thing to enlightenment you can achieve in thirty days or less.
Friendly villagers, beautiful shops, randy yoga-tramps in culottes. Oh, Ubud. But all of this is nothing, when compared to the monkey forest.
At the end of Jl Hanuman, the street of the Monkey God, the village proper suddenly disintegrates into a wall of majegin and bandak trees, towering a hundred feet above the forest floor. The town fades away into the forest as if slipping into a dream of ancient time.
Within the forest, there are a handful of temples, joined by walkways leading from the top of the highest hill through to the river-carved grotto in the forest's depths. Statues are everywhere, carvings of Rama, and of water-bearing servants, icons of komodo dragons, and of course, the omnipresent tribes of macaques that claim the grove as their home.
And without a doubt, it is THEIR house. They aren't afraid to let you know it, either.
Their monkey senses tingling, the elder males begin circling as soon as you enter the compound. All of the macaques have an unfailing ability to know if anything delicious is in your purse or your pockets, much like a homeless person is SF, but cute, and better smelling. From the moment you walk through the gate with your freshly purchased bananas in hand, you will know how it feels to be a woman in America, or a man in an American prison (same-same). You are constantly stalked, harassed, and chittered at. Monkeys will follow you for days, hissing at you, slinking stealthily towards you, climbing you as if you were an ambulatory banana-tree. I finally had to stash my bananas on my head, beneath Jessica Alba, the hat I bought in Mexico.
She's doing quite well, thank you for asking.
There are dozens of the little buggers, and it's a stunning experience, seeing something so close to us as humans, yet so far away at the same time. You find yourself trying to interpret and anthropomorphise their games, fights, sex and interactions. And over the course of an hour, you will see all of the above (often in strange combinations) repeated over and over.
All in all, it's an incredible way to spend a day. I went through eight bananas, had a pack of cloves stolen and eaten (box and all), rescued a group of Japanese tourists from a mini King Kong, had a monkey sit on my head, and had to defend Jessica Alba from an ambitious young macaque who foolishly believed he loved her more than I did.
But don't worry, I didn't hurt him. everyone agreed that it was a painless way to go.
I finally wrapped up with satay and Pocari Sweat in a warung across the street, well pleased. Monkey Temple, bitches. Beautiful, soulful, amazing. Definitely the best five dollars I've spent in my life that didn't end up with a dead hooker under the bed.
Oh shit, the guitarist in the cafe I'm sitting at is performing butchering the shit out of Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here'. If I don't post in the next couple of days, you can reach me, C/O the Indonesia polici, Ubud Jail, Bali. Donations accepted through Pay Pal.
But either way, This is going to hurt him more than it's going to hurt me.
