Matt and Kristen Travel: Indonesia - Day 8

Sleep in! (Until about 8:30) We got up and took our time getting ready this morning, before catching the hotel shuttle bus into Ubud (about 10 minute drive). Our plan was walk down to the Monkey Forest, have a look around walk back up to the art market, grab some lunch and look around a bit.

We got directions from our drop off point from our driver. To the left, then right at the intersection. Ok easy, we thought. The directions weren't wrong, but he didn't mention that it was at the very end of the road he told us to go down. It took around 20 minutes, which isn't long but it was very hot.

When we made it to the forest, there were literally monkeys hanging around out the front. We walked into the forest (it is all paved and there is a temple there and stuff) and there were a ton of monkeys everywhere. It was way better than the monkeys we saw in Thailand, they were just free to roam around, do their thing. You could buy bananas if you wanted to feed them or just watch them do their monkey stuff. We decided not to buy the bananas, we just wanted to look around. We walked around for a little while and a worker offered to take our picture in front of a valley. He then encouraged a monkey that was sitting on the bench next to us to climb onto my lap. The monkey happily ate corn out of Matt's hand while the guy took our picture.

On our way out we decided to stop in the main area near the temple and just sit and watch the monkeys for a little bit. They decided to include us in their games, jumping and climbing on us, chewing on Matt's hat & shirt, playing with my hair. One decided to steal the empty water bottle out of Matt's hands and took off with it. The cute little fella thought it was the best toy out.

We caught a taxi back up to the markets because I just couldn't be bothered walking. The markets were all right, I picked up a couple of things, but there didn't seem to be as much variety as I had hoped.

It was after lunch time and we were getting hungry, so we walked along until we found a cafe we liked the look of. After a long lunch and a little bit of a walk around we headed to the shuttle pick up point to wait for our ride back to the hotel.

It started raining just as our bus showed up. Thankfully it eased of when we were walking back to our room. There was this terrible song playing in the van on the way home. It just kept going on and on like it wouldn't end. The guy next to the driver started humming along, not knowing what it was. And then he kept on humming it only just because...

We spent the afternoon doing a pool crawl. We decided to test out the three pools available to us at the hotel. We started with the one furthest from our room. An adults only infinity pool above the river. It was divine. You have to take an elevator just to get to it. Some of the best views in the hotel are from this pool (although the whole place has amazing views). We stayed a while, talking and taking in the ambience. After a while we got out, headed back up in the elevator and went to the pool nearest the lobby. There were a couple more people using this pool, probably because it is more convenient, compared to the two people that were laying by the other pool. This pool is still pretty nice, but has nothing on the bottom pool. Our final pool was our very own private pool, which is nice just because it's all ours.