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Claire & Steve's Excellent Adventure
After our brief stay in Kuta we hopped in the bus to travel inland to Ubud. It was such a refreshing change even though the cries of "hello, you need transport" echoed from every doorway it was a much more relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere. You could probably describe Ubud as a bit of a haven for hippies, art lovers, yoga junkies and those who love the great outdoors. It is a very cool place made up of lots of intertwining streets and allies with lots of art and craft shops, trendy restaurants selling very healthy food and drinks, health and beauty spas and book stores. It is then surrounded by hills, trees and lush paddy fields. It is definitely somewhere to chill out for a few days and a million miles away from the chaos of Kuta.
We visited the Monkey Forest Temple which as the name suggests was full of monkeys. We opted not to buy the bananas as we didn't fancy being surrounded by hundreds of hungry monkeys. It was a really interesting place though and looked like something out of a film set with huge hanging vines from the trees, ancient stone statues and mysterious looking temples. The monkeys were entertaining too although one did get a little too close for comfort and started climbing up my leg to reach my rucksack - I had forgotten to remove a packet of mints from the side pocket and it was driving this little monkey mad. I soon shook him off and legged it before he could make another attempt at scaling the Claire Peak!
The other highlight was going to see the traditional Kecak dance at night. The performers are all from a local village tribe and act out a story from the Hindu religion. It was reasonably easy to follow although had we not read the written info beforehand we would have been completely lost. The costumes and characters were really good but the best bit was the large group of men who sat in a circle around the stage, singing, chanting and moving their arms. It doesn't sound like much but it was really effective and very entertaining. When we get round to uploading the pictures you might get a better idea of what we mean!
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