Today Eitan learned a few very valuable life lessons:

1. Do not mess with wild animals.
2. Always get all the travel vaccinations before going to 3rd world countries.
3. Listen to your wife when she tells you not to feed the monkeys.

We woke up around 6am to the loudest F$^%&ing rooster concert ever that kept on going until about 1 pm! I thought roosters only sang during sunrise but apparently our neighbor is the Pavarooster (Pavarotti+Rooster! sorry, bad Eitan joke). After breakfast with some delicious Mangosteens, we asked to switch rooms and got a free upgrade with a room at the pool!

This is our new room, for $23 a night is a great deal! who says traveling has to be expensive!

We walked to the Ubud’s monkey forest, house of approximately 600 monkeys (macaques). Eitan thought it would be fun to buy the bananas they sold at the official banana “feed the monkeys” stands and try to feed them (mistake #1).  Sarah was fine with just watching them, but Eitan of course wanted to interact with these lovely creatures of hell.

That baby is cute though!

It was cute until this massive monkey jumped on Eitan to try to eat a banana and scratched his neck in a few places… and there was some blood. If you don’t know, monkeys are carriers of Rabies, a deadly virus that is 100% deadly if untreated. At this moment we were very grateful that Elly Wolf insisted we get the pre-exposure rabies vaccination before we left California.

They had a mini clinic right next the forest, so I guess Eitan wasn’t the first stupid tourist to get injured by a monkey.

The doctor said Eitan was fine and they cleaned the injury and put some ointment on the scratch. Eitan’s anxiety started to build up. (for everyone at Zodiac who chose Indonesia the place I die, you were close to winning)

We proceed to walk through the forest very cautiously and keeping a nice distance from the monkeys.

We specifically left everything at the hotel because the monkeys love to steal flashy things from you when you are not paying attention. Our favorite was the mother monkeys carrying the baby monkeys (super cute!).

We decided to leave the forest and enter a restaurant in perfect timing because it started to rain extremely hard. During rainy season here in Southeast Asia, it rains for around an hour and then is stops completely, if you time it right you can go have lunch while the rain is happening.

It was very relaxing drinking fresh juice, eating Ayam Satay (Chicken skewers with peanut sauce) and watching the rain poor.  The rain stopped and we walked back to the hotel.

On the way back to the main area, we stopped at some souvenir stores where they sold some Sarongs and other crafts.

Eitan was still feeling anxious about his scratch so asked the man at the hotel about going to the hospital just to be safe.  The guy working at the hotel was extremely nice and took Eitan to the hospital on his motor bike and Sarah took a relaxing nap.  Eitan got to the clinic and thankfully because he had the pre-exposure rabies vaccination, he only needed 2 more rabies jabs (if you don’t have the pre-exposure vaccine and this happens to you, you need to find the prophylaxis vaccine which is extremely difficult to find in this places and runs around $3000 dollars).

Knowing Eitan was rabies free for sure we continued to explore Ubud. We went to dinner at what they called Warung which is traditional Indonesian restaurant (this one was traditional but the tourist version) and quite good. We eat several things, mostly vegetables with coconut sauce.

We then went to this traditional show that had great reviews on tripadvisor called the Kecak fire and trance dance. It is basically a praying ceremony where the men get into a trance while making rhythmic ticking noises. It has a Hindu story with the god Rama and other gods that its extremely difficult to follow. It was the weirdest hour of our lives and we don’t understand how this became such a popular tourist show; it sucked.  Sarah had to hold back from laughing because it was so bizarre. They were telling a story but over an hour of this certainly became redundant.

At the end of the show, the horse man stepped on coconut burning charcoal to add some excitement to the already disappointing show.

But the following hour was certainly worth it.  We got Balinese massages. Well Eitan got the traditional Balinese because he cant handle a strong massage; Sarah got a deep tissue massage. We had a room for just the two of us and it was incredible, it also helped to think we payed $6 for the massage hour. They had us wear these funny little black diaper underwear and we would love to show the picture especially of Eitan, but it is a bit x-rated. The massage ended with them serving us delicious ginger tea and us sleeping very great afterwards with no roosters awaking us at 6am!