After a lazy enough breakfast, we headed towards the centre of Ubud.
Ubud is a rather small town in the middle of Bali known as the cultural centre of Bali, and also made famous by Elisabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love. Even though it’s very touristy, I still liked it. As we headed towards the centre, there were of course a lot of guys offering transport or motorbike for rent, but we knew it would be like that and it wasn’t as aggressive as in Seminyak. There are a lot of shops selling art, woodcarvings, souvenirs and clothes everywhere and most of the shops are really cute.
Dropping by from some of the art shops/galleries along the way, we reached the Monkey Forest Sanctuary, which is basically a nice large park that hosts three temples and is also a home for about 300 Balinese macaques. We had been warned that the monkeys can be quite aggressive, but as we had no food with us, they had no reason to attack us. I didn’t expect much from the place (we anticipated it would be very touristy), but I was really nicely surprised. The monkeys were wonderful and the temples and the surrounding park felt quite magical.
Once out of the Monkey Forest, we continue wandering around the streets and art shops until we came to conclusion that it might be a good idea to visit some art museum to get a better grasp of Balinese art. The Agung Rai Museum of Art (called ARMA) appeared to be closest for us, so we headed there. The museum was quite nice – the buildings of the museum are designed in Balinese style and stand amidst gardens, ponds and fountains. The collection of the museum includes the works of various Balinese and foreign painters, inter alia the rather famous German painter Walter Spies.
The museum front yard happened to host the Bali Spirit Festival. We had read the festival ads the day before – it looked interesting but the ticket price was quite high, so we were not sure we wanted to go there. But as we got out of the museum we found ourselves right in festival grounds. So we seized the opportunity and stayed.
The concerts of the festival were really nice, including both Balinese and foreign bands and shows groups (including for example local kecak and fire dancers, xylophone orchestras and bands from Northern California and Burkina Fasso). There were a lot of hippie spirited people in the festival, probably most of them expats and tourists. It reminded Viljandi Folk a bit, but the focus was not so much on ethnic/folk music, but more on spiritual music. We had a good time and were quite happy for the coincidence that placed us amidst the festival.
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