Bali 2 - A Silver Lining with Monkeys

It had seemed like a good idea. The brochure said it was going to take us to good snorkel places, introduce us to sea turtles, show us a hidden beach, walk us through a magnificent temple and end the day with a grilled fish barbecue watching a beautiful sunset. It sounded like a deal to us! (The fact that the brochure was the garish product of a large corporation, offering 10 different packages and was clearly (in hindsight) aimed at a different kind of tourist than us, slipped our notice.) The beach was crowded with noisy boats; at some point the young boy steering ours at high speed stopped it up against 20 others and pointed into the water. "But where is the reef?" said Peter looking through the glass bottomed boat into some cloudy green water. The boy indicated over there and over the side we went. The best thing I saw were some divers learning how to use their equipment underneath me and one lonely blue and yellow fish. No coral, no groups of fish, no sea anemones - nada. Very disappointed and a little pissed off, Peter, I and the young Singaporian couple who had taken the same bait, climbed back into the boat. The turtles were even more of a swize. By the time we had met up with our (very pleasant) driver again, the 4 of us were none too happy. The next stop was "Dreamland' , a not so hidden beach where surfers played and the tourist industry is building huge villas. Peter did have fun getting knocked about by the waves and I liked the people watching. Finally the temple, with busloads of other visitors.
So what was the silver lining? The most interesting part of the day for me was driving around southern Bali seeing how people live. That and the monkeys.
The driving is crazy - high speed and narrow lanes with millions of motor scooters swooshing around between cars, buses and trucks. Children and dogs play precariously close to the road. There is a great humble jumble of life occurring just a few feet back. Houses and shops have their fronts open during the day so you can see the bottles of pop being sold, the women cooking and the concrete forms being poured. There are many billboards advertising many familiar products. To my surprise, lots of the signs are in English. I'm not sure if those are just for the tourist trade, though I saw a hospital listing all its departments in English, so that didn't make sense. Amidst all this commerce, people were putting up the most fanciful, glorious decorations - huge, flexible bamboo sticks which bend over the street like lampposts and were covered with bent ribbons of rattan in Dr. Seuss like crazy, spiky arrangements. These are in honour of a religious holiday starting today called Galungan. So, I liked the drive.





And how could I not like the monkeys at the temple? Gray, furry monkeys walking around, grooming one another, having sex, nursing babies and generally watching the world go by. All looking like reflections of ourselves, only with longer tails. We had been warned to leave our hats, bags and eyeglasses in the car. There were three young women walking just ahead of me when I saw this monkey suddenly set his sights on them. Lickety split her foot went up and Mr Monkey had her flip flop off in a second! And he wasn't giving it back; he just sat there with the purple flip flop in one hand and the nice piece of yellow banana in the other. We figured the old woman who sells the banana and the monkeys have a deal - the monkey steals the flip flop, the woman makes the sale and the monkey gets the food!
In the end a very interesting day; just not the one I had expected.


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Location:Southern Bali