Monkey business

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We arrived in Ubud after an uneventful flight, but had a nutcase taxi driver that made his own traffic lanes, used side walks and ignored traffic lights. Still we made it in the end, grateful to be in one piece.
Without anywhere booked Carla set off to find our new home and found a corker, a big room in a hotel with a pool. After days at sea and on the road, almost all of our clothes were very dirty, to save money Jim set up his own washing shop and after nearly four hours everything was pretty much only half clean, oh well he tried.
Ubud is full of culture and art, there are very high quality sculptures and paintings in every shop, which are more like galleries when we browsed through them.

Ubud has a fantastic Monkey Sanctuary with hundreds of monkeys living and causing trouble in temples within a jungle canopy. The simian hooligans run the joint, they terrorise tourists foolish enough to bring in bananas for them (we witnessed a women being climbed over and having her hair pulled!), splash and jump about in the pool, fight over food or lounge about having a good groom. We loved them and could've watched them all day.

Whilst in Ubud we decided to go on our own trek in the surrounding area, funny how things never seem that far on a map. Our walk was an exhausting 5-6 hours in the sun along busy roads, which fortunately did have lots of sculpture shops to take a breather in. We also saw some of the biggest spiders in our lives!
We stopped in at random temples on route, the best being Goa Gajah (Elephant Temple), within it walls were small temples, a cave, rice fields, lots of steps and rubbish signposts (we managed to get lost and ended up outside of the area somehow).
At the very end of the walk the roads became quieter and went through jungle and rice fields, which was the highlight of the day.

After a final couple of days chilling in Ubud's very mellow bars we took our flight back to Singapore. Indonesia down, the loop around Southeast Asia's was next...

Love, a very exhausted Jim and Carla.
xxx

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Photos

Jim and his new bag
Happy little camper!

Offering to the Gods
With a Jammy Dodger! and a fag.

Using tools!
Monkey using a stone to break a nut. Impressive.

Carving on the street
There are loads of shops with huge all manner of statues.

Random statue
On route of our trek