A day in the monkey forest and zoo

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today we ventured out with one of the local drivers (big scorpion) to Ubud. we had planned on doing a trip to dreamland, but decided to do something easier on our bodies, this decision may have been influenced by a really good and long surf session the previous day. I won't speak for Andy, but my shoulders were begging for a day of rest. We left our hotel after an as usual excellent breakfast and drove about an hour to Ubud, first to the Bali zoo just outside of Ubud. It was a pretty cool zoo, quite small pens for most animals, and usually only one of each so alot of them seemed quite bored. we walked all around the park and saw quite a few animals, crocidiles, white tigers, lions, pygmy hippopotomus. Andy and I got some sweet pics holding this giant iguana and with a crazy parrot on the shoulder. After doing a loop of the entire park we grabbed these coupons for activities, they were 5000 Rp each, and Andy got oe to go "Crocodile fishing" and I got one to feed the tigers. Andy's crocodile fishing expedition was pretty epic, they basically tie a hunk of meet to a fishing pole and you get to dangle it above these like 10 ft crocs! afterwards we went back to the tiger pen and after spending some time waching this guy cleaning he lion pen, pretty amazing him just walking around spraying everything down in this en with the lion still in it, also spraying the lion with his hose, didn't seem like to good of an idea to us, but he seemed to know what he was doing. afterwards, he came out with some meet and his pole to put it on so i could feed the tigers. i put one chunk of meat in the cage and he tore it and the pole right out of my hands, and pulled the pole into the cage, after that the attendant showed us that you can just feed them with your bare hands... haha not for me this thing was huge! Andy was prety into it, so he tried it and got a paw that was prolly as big as his hand swung at him through the gate. But successflly fed a tiger with his bare hands! After finishing there we headed to the sacred monkey forest in ubud. we walked in and right off the bat there were monkeys on the steps entering the forest. We took some photos of them and then kept moving, the forest splits into like 4 stone paths, we checked each out and explored all the secluded little areas, taking tons of pictures af the awesome monkeys. in the main area there was a pool of water and small tree and we watched the monkeys swim and play in the water and jump from the tree into the water or onto eachother, very entertaining. we sat down in one aea and some monkeys just crawled all over us, which was pretty cool. Afterwards we headed into Ubud which was like a 15 minute walk and met back up with our driver. We grabbed some lunch with him at a slightly more expensive resturant he knew of (almost $20 for the 3 of us, haha). Then we rolled back into kuta and decided we better get some stuff in order cause i think we might be heading to sumbawa with Jesse tomarrow, and we're not really ready at all... haha.

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