Sanur & Ubud

I arrived in Sanur on Sunday and met my roomie for this trip. Charlotte is absolutely divine! She's a year older than me, from London, England, and is trying to teach me cockney slang. She has a marketing role in event planning over in England and gets to meet everyone from David Beckham to Bon Jovi as part of her job. As exciting as that is, she took a few months sabbatical from work and is traveling around the world. She just spent the last month in Africa and then after Bali and Lombok she will be heading onto Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Dubai, and Kuwait. She is taking two months to do these others, bringing her travels to approximately 4-5 months. Charlotte (or Lottie as I affectionatly refer to her as) is trying to convince me to join her through Thailand and the rest of southeast Asia. I'm sure Blair would be okay if I extended my vacation, right? ;o) I'll quickly introduce you to the rest of my crew. Our fearless tour leader is Derek - a tall, tanned guy from Canada! He grew up in Hamilton, ON, moved to Amsterdam for a girl in his early twenties, left 3 months later and moved to Thailand. He has been living, teaching, and touring people through Thailand for the last 6 and a bit years. He has recently started doing Indonesian tours and despite owning a house in Bangkok, he is planning on moving back home to Canada soon. The majority of the people here are traveling solo with the exception of Ryan and Holly (two 21 year olds from Ireland) and Cara and Alexandria (two 24 year olds from Miami). There's also Sarah from London, England, Androula from Melbourne, Meghan from Brisbane, and Peter from somewhere in Australia. The two Miami girls, Sara, Lottie, and I hang out together the most and share loads of laughs - or in cockney slang "having a giraffe". Before I left Canada there was a lot of warnings issued on a locally produced liquor called "arak" which was found to contain methanol. More than two dozen people died from the poisoning(with a quarter of that being tourists from US and UK). I was prepared to stick to bottled beer for my trip just to be safe. Most restaurants give you a welcome drink and it usually contains arak. When I was offered one I tried to politely decline but the server said "no no. It okay. People stop dying. No more dying. You drink.". So I drank. Very tasty beverage and I'm still kickin it live. The guys that tainted the alcohol worked at the arak factory and the bad brew was quickly removed from the shelves so all has returned to normal on the liquor landscape. On Monday we headed from Sanur to Ubud, the cultural capital of Bali. There are loads of artists creating furniture, paintings, jewellery, and clothes. It is a total sensory overload. We headed over to the monkey sanctuary and were quickly accosted by the aggressive macaques. They will climb up you and dig into your pockets looking for food. I had to swat some of the alpha males back and they bared their canines at me. The male monkeys are quite fascinated with their willy's and its obvious that man hasn't evolved too much. There were thousands of monkeys in this forest reserve and I could easily see them banding together and taking over the entire island of Bali. It was literally like being in the "Planet of the Apes". Despite my reputation as the monkey whisperer, I was a little happy to get out of there but it obviously wasn't soon enough. As I was sitting on the steps at the entrance to the sanctuary, a macaque flew over the wall, pounced on my pack, and nabbed my chili-spiced rice crackers. It freaked the crap out of me. Then the cheeky bastard had the balls to sit on the top of the 15 foot wall and eat my chips in a cocky "you're such a stupid tourist" manner. The theiving bastard monkeys also stole my flamenco-style fan that I got in Spain. Lottie, Sarah and I went off on our own to meet Wayan Nuriasih, the elixir-mixing friend of the author of "Eat, Pray, Love". We found her shop and enjoyed her delicious vitamin lunch. We could have had a treatment with her but we didn't have time for a full consultation. Maybe on the way back?? Later in the day, the Miami girls (Cara and Alex) and Lottie and I went to an elephant sanctuary. Yo - give it a pass on the macaques but you'll definitely want an Indonesian elephant! Did ya know.....Elephants are one of the only mammals that cry when they're sad. Elephants used to be used a ton in Indonesia working in the logging industry but new technologies have put them out of work. So a group of elephant handlers from Sumatra brought roughly 8 elephants to Bali to live at an elephant sanctuary. The handlers were a hillarious group of guys and loved to joke around. Although we only paid to visit the elephants, they let us pet and ride these gentle giants which saved us well over $200 between the four of us. It was incredible to ride the elephant - you sit on their neck just behind their head and steer them with your feet in the back of their ears. And they're brilliant! In the elephants spare time, they paint beautiful pictures and play basketball. You should see the height of the net! The handlers said they also like to play futbol (soccer) too but they definitely prefer basketball. I best be going now. Later, Giff