Ubud and the Monkey Forest

The day after our arrival at the new hotel, the morning begins with a really delicious breakfast. The hotel is in Tegallalang, north of Ubud, and we are staying three nights. It is 27 degrees with a partly cloudy sky, and there is quite a lot on the plates: Toast with mango, bananas, strawberries and pink pieces of fruit, a salad with radishes and edible flowers, a croissant with butter and red jam next to melon, watermelon and half a lime, and a waffle with banana, dollops of cream and chopped nuts. There is also a pot of tea and a cappuccino with a leaf pattern in the milk foam.

Afterwards we head over to Ubud and visit the Monkey Forest. It is a patch of forest with Hindu temples where long-tailed macaques live. One of them sits in the fork of a large tree, its long tail hanging down.

The forest’s full name is Mandala Suci Wenara Wana. It belongs to the village of Padangtegal in Ubud, which runs it itself, income included. Its roughly 12.5 hectares hold three temples, built around the middle of the 14th century and reserved for the local community: The main temple, Pura Dalem Agung Padangtegal, is dedicated to Shiva, Pura Beji by a holy spring is where people purify themselves before ceremonies, and Pura Prajapati is the cremation temple. According to the management, more than a thousand macaques live in the forest, and the staff feed them at least nine times a day, mainly with sweet potatoes. We see long-tailed macaques once more on this trip eight days later, on Lombok at the Bukit Merese viewpoint.

The Monkey Forest’s website (as of October 2026) gives its opening hours as 9 am to 6 pm, with last entry at 5 pm. Adults pay 130,000 rupiah, children 100,000. Food, drinks and plastic bags are not allowed in the forest, and there are lockers in the lobby. You should neither touch nor feed the monkeys, nor look them straight in the eye, because they can take that as a sign of aggression.

Then we go on into town, where Annina does some shopping. It is raining heavily. Ubud lies in the centre of Bali. The name comes from the Balinese word ubad, medicine, because many medicinal plants and herbs grow in the area.

In front of a shop stands a petrol pump labelled Pertamax and Pertalite, the names of two grades of petrol from the state-owned company Pertamina. Pertalite has an octane rating of 90, Pertamax of 92. In a fridge stand bottles of Bintang, an Indonesian beer brand, packed tightly together, with a white cake on top.

For dinner we are back at the hotel. A fresh coconut with a straw and a mint leaf stands on the table, with a logo engraved in the shell. We are served a black pan with pieces in brown sauce, topped with a small heap of fine white strips and a purple flower, along with flatbreads studded with peanuts. In the background a plate of rice is waiting.