Ubud

Our visit to Bali, Indonesia got off to a bit of a rough start when we arrived to the island on the eve of Nyepi. Nyepi is a day of silence, fasting and meditation, but the night before is a big party. Essentially, this was like arriving at Times Square on New Year's Eve. This created a bit of a problem for us. We needed to get cash out of an ATM in order to pay for our tourist visas into the country (no credit card payment allowed). Due to the holiday, all ATMs in the airport were completely out of cash. Likewise, in order to leave the airport to get cash, we needed to have valid visas. As you can see, this was a real win-win situation for us. Luckily, there were a few other people in our same situation, but that didn't matter to the security guards. After some confusion and deliberation, we "snuck" past immigration (is that frowned upon?) and got a cab to drive us around the town during mid-celebration. It turned out to be a pretty thrilling experience riding around on Nyepi Eve, without valid visas, and desperately looking for a place to trade credit card charges for cold hard cash. Eventually, we headed back into the airport through the exit doors to wait in line for over an hour to finally get our visas. Yikes! We were ready to call it quits right there, but luckily, things improved pretty quickly after that.

In Ubud, we stayed at a 'homestay' - there were a few little cottages for guests, but the people who ran the homestay also lived there with their families. It was a nice way to see how families live in Bali, which we wouldn't have seen if we had stayed at a more traditional tourist resort. It was especially nice on Nyepi - all tourists are confined to their hotels that day, but we had the family to take care of us and bring us food.

Ubud is in the central portion of the Bali Island and is regarded as the cultural center of the island and is home to many artists and craftspeople. It's also home to Monkey Forest, where we saw lots of temples, ancient looking statues, and yes, monkeys. They were pretty aggressive little things too. The signs posted in the area said that feeding the monkeys was okay. Jesse attempted to give one a piece of fruit out of a plastic bag and ended up having to quickly throw the whole bag down to avoid attack. Oops!

The visa "line":


Hanging out on the front porch at our homestay:


Monkeys:


Cute!

Monkey 1, Jesse 0:

Cool bridge in Monkey Forest:

At a pretty rice paddy near our homestay:

A delicious dinner of roast duck with accompaniments:

Bali is a very religious place - nearly every store and house had an offering similar to this one in front of it at all times: