Indonesia: Ubud (Day 6 Cont'd, Saturday, 080109)

We take a turn inside Ubud Palace--where the royal family still resides--just across the street from Ibu Oka.



It's...diverting, and beautiful, but I've just had one of the top ten best meals of my life; at this point, Buckingham Palace and the Magic Kingdom could drop on my head and I'd still be walking around post-coital and unseeing.

It's purty, though, ain't it?



Eric and I trudge back home for our first nap of the day, and I'm still floating away on a cloud of porky bliss, when we wake up to visit the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, where hundreds of Balinese macaques, also known as long-tail macaques, have free reign.

They sell bananas at the entrance, and one woman's gigantic bunch is plucked from her grasp by a particularly cheeky little fucker. (I wish now I'd gotten her email info so's I could send the vid to her.)

Eric's attacked from behind by one macaque as he's trying to fake-out another one; they're smart as all fuck, and probably used to finagling bananas from naive tourists, and I'm in my usual frenzy of "oooh, look at animicles!"

We pause for a bit at the wading pool, watching the younger macaques gamboling in the water, rough-housing from limb to limb. It occurs to me, while watching them have at it, to marvel how you could see them play like this and still doubt that we are not in some way related. Yay, Darwinism! Boo, Creationism and Intelligent Design!

We're mesmerized, until I manage to shake it off and drag us onward, to a separate, gated sanctuary. Before we enter, we have to don green sarongs and yellow scarves and hand over a small donation. There's a man who Stacy Londoning it up, helping us get in gear, and giving a chuckle at one tourist's backassward attempt to tie her own sarong. Foolish whitie.

Inside, shockingly enough, are...more macaques. They're actually demonstrably chiller in this compound: three youngins sleep together in a huddle of cuteness that has me shooting baby unicorns out of my asshole, there's a playgroup of mothers with (three) bebes in tow, and one guy on a raised platform has a decent-sized rock that he's dribbling obsessively, like a second grader on crystal.