Have Macaque and Eat it

Happy Sunday everyone and welcome to a brand new year. Of course we are already three full days in to it but by now I’m sure 99% of you have already failed in your attempts to keep to your new years resolutions. Never mind, 2016 is only 362 days away.

My new years resolution is, as of today, still intact. If you’ve been keeping up to date you should be able to guess what it is with little trouble. It is of course, not to lose any more bank cards. Soph’s NYR is to make sure she keeps an eye on me whenever I use an ATM, pay with my card, have control of the wallet and generally at all times. So we’re pretty proud of ourselves at the moment. The fact we have no bank cards left to actually lose is besides the point. We’re doing well.

Our new years day was spent in bed worrying about finances. Nat West were blocking my Western Union transaction due to suspicion of fraud, we had less money in our accounts than expected, and we still had a rather large bill to pay to the hotel we were staying in. Thankfully, after numerous online chat conversations with Nat West workers, tens of phone calls to the fraud squads and a conversation with a Western Union scout in Germany, we go it all sorted. We also realised we had a little more money than we first thought. Phew.

Having spent enough time in Nusa Dua we decided to head up north a little to the small town of Ubud. We were hoping to find place that was not only interesting, clean and fun, but also cheap. Basically we wanted to have our cake and eat it. However we still had little expectations for the place after such poor experiences elsewhere on the island. To be honest we knew very little about it. Just that I took about 90 minutes to get to and didn’t have a beach.

The journey consisted of traffic jam after traffic jam. As we got to Ubud we passed lots of hotels and hostels. We saw lots of bars and restaurants too. As we pulled outside our place there was nothing but a plastic sign and a tiny entrance that would be invisible to the passer by. We had a bad feeling immediately. We’d spent ages choosing a hostel that would not only be cheap but also be livable. One that perhaps you could spend more than 5 minutes in before having people jump on you with air sealed suits and fumigation sprays and locking you in a plastic cell. Our first impressions lead to us looking over our shoulder for men in bright yellow body suits.

However the second we squeezed through the tiny Alice In Wonderland door, our feelings changed. We were given a tremendous welcome by everyone. The lady who seems to run the place, her husband, their one year old son, her sister, his parents, their grandparents, everyone was so happy to see us. Our rooms not bad either. Nice shower, clean bed. The fact their is no air con, no tv, no in room WiFi doesn’t seem to matter after the welcome. Perhaps if we’d got that last week at the bug hotel things would be different.

No, they definitely wouldn’t.

After dropping our bags down we headed out to get some dins. We decided on a small place that was just off the main road. There were signs all over the walls about how they considered customer service their number one priority. We’d been to many places like that. Difference was they prioritised super bad customer service rather than good. Here the food was great, they gave us a free beer, free cinnamon and jasmine tea and a smile. In fact they probably asked us if our food was ok too many times. They either loved hearing compliments or they were almost expecting us to dislike something. We stayed there for hours before heading back through the market. It was good to have something to do in the evenings again that wouldn’t brake the bank.

Our sleep was ok. There was some miserable cat moaning all night right outside our door and a cockerel that couldn’t tell the difference between moonlight and daylight, but it wasn’t too bad. We actually managed to get up for breakfast too. 2015 was turning out to be a good year.

2015: the year of the breakfast.

Ubud is famous (even though we’d never heard of it before last week) for its monkeys, or long tailed macaques. You may remember that we visited the Thai town of Lopburi a month or so ago. There the monkeys run a small section of the town. Here they are kept, as best as possible, to the confinement of a large monkey sanctuary. Here they can ran about and swing through the trees like they were born to do. You can, if you’re feeling brave, buy bananas to feed them with. Instead we decided to save money and just pick up the left over bananas lying all over the floor. It wasn’t long before one spotted me.

Marty, we’ll call him, saw my banana long before I saw him (cheeky). He took off from his little rocky perch and went straight for it. Startled a little, I forgot to let go. Instead I just pulled my arm away. But Marty was fully committed to the cause. He followed the prize and finally took control as he reached my shoulder. You would think, having now grasped my banana (stop it…), that Marty would have run off to his tree to show off his winnings to his jealous monkey mates. Instead he stayed put. After all the effort of having to get his lunch, he wasn’t going to simply ask for a takeaway. He was eating in today, and nothing was going to stop him.

A top of my head he ate. He mushed up the banana, now well and truly his, squashed it into my hair and ate it from there. He dribbled it down my back and my bag as well as slowly massaging it into my neck. Even as I attempted to move away he wasn’t having it. He just repositioned himself and continued his lunch. Finally he had enough and jumped off into the woods, belly full. I was of course left with chewed up banana dripping off me. It was an experience I tell ya.

We both continued to walk around taking as many pictures as possible. Soph is like a ninja with the camera. Nothing gets between her and a good shot. There were tons of tiny baby monkeys clinging on to their mum’s or causing little play fights, so Soph was filling up our memory card quickly. While she was attempting to get close to one, I had another monkey get a little too close to my bag. The next thing I knew he had something in his hand that I wasn’t willing to let go. At first I pictured one of our phones in his grasp, so, without thinking, I went for him. I managed to nick it back only to realise it was a map from Penang. Fair to say he wasn’t to keen on my sudden attack, so he went for me. Teeth glaring he threw a few punches at my arm before jumping on me. I quickly flew an arm out and pushed him away. We then ran. There was only two of us and a whole jungle of them. We were well and truly outnumbered.

After a narrow escape we came across some more little ones that Soph could get close to. Most were running about like the children they are but one was chilled. Soph went and sat down next to him so I could get a photo. But after only a matter of seconds he decided Soph needed a good grooming. He began picking at her jumper like she was flea ridden mate of his. Think she felt a little uneasy about the whole thing so got up pretty quickly after I’d taken the picture.

Having spent 3 hours playing with these little rascals we left to get some lunch, but not before I ran into another mini ruck with a monkey attempting to steal my bag. It really was a great place to spend the day. We both really enjoyed Lopburi but those monkeys had a tendency to bite us every time they got close. These guys just wanted to eat. One even stole some hand sanitiser for a woman bag and attempted to eat it. Reckon if I was eating bananas all day everyday, I’d be willing to try anything new when the opportunity arose.

So now we have come back the hotel for a bit to shower and wash off bits of banana. We were hoping to changing our flight to Perth from the 15th to 10th, but it seems STA are messing us about a bit by saying there are no flights available. There are, so we are trying to get them to do their job and sort us out at the moment. But as it stands we are not moving to Australia until the 15th. Thankfully we have now found a place where we can enjoy and still stick to our budget. Seems that we can have our cake and eat it. So far so good.

We’ll leave you today with a few more of our monkey pics. Enjoy.