Ubud, Bali

One of my main aims while living in Japan is to travel, both around Japan and other parts of Asia as much as I can. Therefore, this winter break I decided to go to Indonesia and I would like to tell you about my trip.

The first place we went was Ubud in Bali which is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We stayed in Ubud for two days and found it to be an interesting mix of art, religion and Balinese culture. Bali is known as the ‘island of the gods’ and everywhere in Bali there are offering like this one.

On the first day we went to the Monkey Forest which was a little scary as when we arrived we seen a monkey climb on a visitor and she couldn’t get it off! We decided not to buy banana’s to feed them but others did. It was funny seeing the monkeys steal item from people and try to open them.

In the center of the forest was a temple and this meant that there were a lot of interesting statues like the ones below.

Then we went to the The Threads of Life, a textile gallery dedicated to the promoting Indonesian textiles and providing support to weavers in small communities. Please have a look at their website http://www.threadsoflife.com/ the textiles they had were beautiful and they had videos showing how the communities make the fabrics.

Later that day it started to rain so we went for a massage which was very relaxing. That night went for dinner and my friend recommended Gado Gado an Indonesian dish of vegetables, fried tofu and peanut sauce. I had not tried peanut sauce before but it was delicious, now a favourite of mine!

On the second day we decided to take a walk through the rice fields which was beautiful. We stopped and had lunch at an amazing organic food restaurant in the middle of the fields and the view was perfect. I was so excited that they served middle-eastern food which I loved as I used to work in a middle-eastern cafe, so I had hummus and salad.

We then went to the a small temple in the center of Ubud and the market next to the temple. It was difficult to shop at the market as everyone was shouting at you to look at their stall and it was hard to leave it without buying anything if you did stop.

That evening we went to a traditional Balinese fire dance, which was amazing. I was particularly in awe of the costumes that they wore. Unfortunately I couldn’t get these photos from my camera and I think they are lost, but my friend let me use some of her’s.

The next morning we traveled to Gili Air near Lombok and I will tell you about that in my next post.