August 18, 2025
Joanie had quite a shock when she went down for breakfast today at our hotel. As soon as she was served, this fellow swooped over like he owned the place and stole her breakfast, not once but twice:
In response to the monkey’s incursions, this Balinese man took up arms to scare the monkey away.
Joanie said the monkey was unimpressed and continued to act like he owned the place.
I was up in my bedroom, writing, when she texted me about her experience downstairs. That’s when I decided to skip the free hotel breakfast and to go out instead to my favorite local restaurant down the street, Mother, where I had a fantastic breakfast of greens, sourdough toast, eggs with spinach, sun-dried tomato, and feta, with a great pepper sambal (salsa) to go with it. After more than two weeks of Balinese food, I’ve been happy to eat familiar western food here in the city. They even had oat milk and honey for my pot of black tea. It was all delicious.
I love the neighborhood where we’re staying during the middle section of our tour: NYU Kuning Village, also know as Young Coconut Village.
It’s calm, walkable, full of great little restaurants, a big soccer field, a magnificent banyan tree, and laundry services accessible right out on the street. I just picked up a small bag of laundry I dropped off last night. It cost 20,000 rupiah, $1.24 to have it washed, dried and folded. Now that’s convenience.
In past years, the tours I’ve run with Judy and Surya have stayed in hotels in Ubud proper, but the gridlock has gotten so severe, it’s better to stay on the outskirts of the city. And at the end of our village road, you can walk through the Monkey Forest right into Ubud.
For my free day, I decided I wanted to go out and take photos, to just wander through this neighborhood, and then through the streets of Ubud, looking for moments and images that caught my fancy, touched me, surprised me or made me laugh. I’d be on the hunt for beauty.
My only other goal for today? To make it to Tukies, the best coconut ice cream parlor in the world.
I set Google maps to get me to the Tukies ice cream parlor closest to our hotel. Google said it would be a half hour walk. Considered the backed up traffic, I thought I’d probably get there on foot faster than a car could make it. Only the scooters were making headway on the roads, weaving in and out of cars mostly at a standstill.
It was hot out, the hottest day we’ve had on this tour. I was dripping with sweat right away. But I kept walking. The streets were full of clothing stores, tattoo parlors, coffeeshops, restaurants, guest houses, hotels, and thousands of other businesses. People were everywhere. I was in a busy, crowded city walking along the busy main drag: Monkey Forest Road.
While I was navigating to Tukies, I ran into a member of our group, Nancy Kramer. She thought coconut ice cream sounded pretty good and we decided to keep exploring together.
These are some of things we saw on our way to Tukies:
Finally we made it. The ice cream was as good as I remembered.
Tucked just a block behind the teeming busy main street were hideaways like this one, some residential, some commercial hotels.
Soon after we left Tukies, I spotted this tree wrapped with a black and white checkered cloth, a sacred textile known as a kain poleng, which represents the fundamental duality of the universe. Wrapping a tree in this cloth designates the sacredness of the tree. It acknowledges the presence of a powerful spirit that lives in the tree and serves as a reminder to maintain balance in the world and in life. It seemed incongruous in the middle of a very commercial urban landscape. Yet that juxtaposition is classic Bali.
The moment we passed the tree, we heard the sound of Balinese music up ahead of me. We started walking fast to catch up with this procession. Be sure to turn up your sound!
We followed the procession, which was headed toward the Monkey Forest. On the way, we ran into this sign.
I guess monkeys were going to continue to be a theme in my day. Just a few steps from this sign, I came upon this scene:
And then, next door to the Monkey Forest, this warning:
A couple of blocks later, Nancy and I looked up and saw this. I guess monkeys need their coffee fix, too.
After another twenty minutes walking in the heat, all the stores, shops, restaurants and tattoo parlors started to get repetitive. We started looking for an alley or a side street, some way to get off Monkey Forest Road. We found an alley where we could sit down for a few minutes. There was even a public faucet that I stuck my head under to cool off.
Since Nancy and I both love to take photos, we googled, “Best places to take photos in Ubud, Bali.” And one of the things that came up was the Campuhan Ridge Walk, a place I’d never heard of before. The description said:
For those who enjoy a bit of a trek, the Campuhan Ridge Walk offers panoramic views of Ubud’s hills and valleys. The path is relatively easy to navigate and provides numerous opportunities for capturing the lush greenery, rolling hills, and the expansive sky. Early mornings offer soft light and cooler temperatures, perfect for both a comfortable hike and numerous photo ops.
That sounded good to both of us. The city streets were sweltering. We both like to hike. Nature sounded appealing; there would probably be some shade. Google maps said it would take us half hour walk to get there. Neither of us was up for another half hour walking in the city, so we decided to hire a ride.
The cars weren’t moving at all, but the scooters were. I’d downloaded the Grab app before I left California. It’s like Uber. You connect it with your credit card and use an app to book transport. In Bali, Grab is used by locals to book rides with both cars and on the back of scooters, and also to order take-out. I’d wanted to try out the app, and this seemed like the right moment. It was incredibly easy and intuitive. I typed in our destination and was immediately notified that an available driver was two minutes away. I’d typed in that we needed two scooters for two people, but only one driver showed up. So Nancy took the proferred helmet from the driver and hopped on the back of scooter #1. I told her I’d book a second scooter as soon as she left.
I could track Nancy’s progress on the app, just like with Uber, but soon discovered that I couldn’t order a second scooter until she arrived at our destination—because the app was certain that I was already on a bike. How could I possibly need to hire another one when I was already getting a ride? So I had to wait until she arrived.
Getting to our destination was only a seven-minute ride. As soon as Nancy texted me that she’d arrived safely, I ordered a second scooter. It, too, arrived in a just a couple of minutes, and soon I was on the back. The only problem was that the helmet the driver was carrying for a passenger was so small I had to take my glasses off to fit it on my head. So everything became a giant blur, but maybe that was just as well. Instead of seeing the never-ending sea of scooters buzzing through the Ubud streets from a car window, I was suddenly on one of those scooters, weaving in and out of all that traffic.
My driver asked where I was from. I said, “California, in the United States.” He immediately started singing “Hotel California.” I laughed, and that’s when I got a bug or some dust in my right eye. I had to close my eyes for the rest of the ride. I held on to my driver’s waist and we quickly reached my destination. There was Nancy, happily chatting with a local. I thanked my driver. The ride had cost less than a dollar, so I tipped him more than the price of the transit. I’d learned from one of tour drivers, who drives for Grab on the side, that the drivers are horribly underpaid. I figured the best thing I could do was provide a generous tip.
This was my scooter driver:
Nancy and I started following the path indicated by this sign, having no idea at all what we would find.
Obviously, we found a lot of beauty.
There were tons of interesting things to photograph, making us both very happy:
Nancy and I both have a thing about doors:
I loved the Indonesian flag in this picture (it was just Independence Day) and the kite in the corner of the sky. It’s kite flying season in Bali and we were seeing kites everywhere.
Nancy spotted this shot of these beautiful flowers, and I took a picture of it, too. It’s fun being out with another photographer and seeing what they notice, how they see the world and how they capture it.
We climbed up and down on a long, shaded stone pathway and ended up walking through villages we didn’t expect. It reminded us both of walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Nancy had come on my creative Camino pilgrimage, a year ago.
It was an odd area—old traditional buildings, offerings on the street, juxtaposed with money changers and lots of upscale hotels and restaurants. It felt to me like an area in the process of being decimated by tourism. The manager of one of the restaurants we talked to said that Russians now own a huge portion of the property in Bali and that less and less belongs to the Balinese. The development here felt invasive, not in balance or harmony.
I was continuing to mop sweat off my brow on a regular basis. We stopped twice for cold drinks along the way. I was so grateful to have this delicious lime/ginger/honey drink on a balcony overlooking a rice field.
When I visited the bathroom, it felt great to stick my head under the faucet again:
Eventually, we wandered off on a small side road and found a rice field path, so we started following it. Nancy took a video of me from the rear. So, you can see the path we were walking on.
Along the way, we saw these workers:
Nancy captured a great portrait of a dog who’d been bounding joyfully through the rice fields. It made me miss home and miss Luna!
By 6:00 pm, it started growing darker. It gets dark quickly here in Bali. We began walking back toward the main road so we could catch a lift home.
This was the last shot of the night—Nancy’s.
What a great free day!
P.S. I’m posting this the day after our free day. It was fun hearing reports from everyone about what they did. What a range: a 2:00 am fishing trip, shopping in Ubud, resting and getting massages, reading and relaxing, going on a birdwatching walk, ambling around and seeing what appeared, doing a deep dive into art and textiles, walking in the Monkey Forest, visiting a relative who happens to live in Bali, and more. Everyone agreed—a day off in the middle of the trip was a great idea.