Bali, Day 5: More Temples and Monkeys

It was another daytrip day today, but it was much shorter than yesterday. At this current hotel, they actually bring our breakfast up to our balcony, which is very nice. We got a sort of omlette and fruit salad for breakfast, pretty yummy. We actually got confused about the time because I thought we set the alarm for 8 but it was actually 7, and we were rushing and was like why is our driver so late when it wasn't even the time yet. That was pretty humorous.



Anyway, when he finally did come, on time of course, we drove to a few places. First we went to the temples at Taman Ayun. They had lots of pagoda-shaped temples, but instead of being round like East Asian, they were square shapㄷd and seemed to be made of straw.






After these temples, we went to the Alas Kedaton Monkey Forest, which apparently has some of the least aggressive monkeys (but I haven't been to the other two, so I can't compare). We were there relatively early so there wasn't a lot of people there. There were some very fat monkeys and some very young monkeys. Unfortunately it was the fat ones that love to come up and jump on top of you (and yes, some of them can be quite heavy) and eat peanuts, but the young baby monkeys are the shy ones. There was a ton of monkeys everywhere, just sitting on the floor, on the fences, on the temples, everywhere. It was almost surreal to be surrounded by so many monkeys in close proximity.













After monkeying around, we went to Tanah Lot. Now, this temple is best during sunset, but we had time now, so why not. From the parking lot to the temple area was a journey, because it was windy roads around lots and lots of vendors and restaurants and people. Finally, we got the water's edge, where we saw the little temple perched on its little island (you could walk in the water to get to the other side, but we passed). The temple itself wasn't too big I could see the location can be pretty nice.





We had our lunch a local restaurant on the way back to the parking lot, of which I had some kind of chicken soup and Aaron got Indonesian fried rice with some satay (meat on sticks).





The rest of the day was uneventful because we were pretty tired and just headed back to the hotel. I was feeling a little sick so I just lay in bed and rested for awhile. For dinner, we tried out a Japanese restaurant nearby. I ordered some cold noodles on a bamboo plate, which I could just top with soy sauce, it was pretty good and refreshing. Aaron ordered some rice with anchovy and seaweed on top, and we shared an eggplant and a something that looked like a crab cake for appetizers.