Escape to... Bali I 63
I
n Ubud’s Sacred Monkey Forest, there are signs warning people not to touch, feed or make eye contact with the animals, but no one takes any notice. There are bananas for sale and staff hand out fistfuls of peanuts to tourists. It doesn’t take much to
attract the monkeys – I see one tear open a shopping bag, and another peel fruit while sat on a child’s shoulder. They especially like glittery earrings – on the stone steps of an amphitheatre, one leaps on to a woman and snatches at her jewelled lobe, making her scream, before running off with his prize. Tentatively making our way
through the jungle, keeping an eye on the squabbling macaques in the trees, we pass ancient, moss-covered temples, statues of grinning apes, and ornate winged dragons guarding a stone bridge high above a ravine. Officially a nature reserve (open daily 8.30am-6pm), its 700 or so monkeys are fed on sweet potato three times a day, but this doesn’t suppress their appetite for mischief. While I pose for a photo, a juvenile springs from nowhere and grabs my face, leaving two neat sets of scratches (albeit faint) across my temples. I spend the next hour googling “Can you catch rabies from a monkey scratch?” (the answer is yes so I am freaking out) and ordering bottles of Bintang beer from the nearby Habitat Café, which has free wifi (
habitatubud.com).
Next door is hipster co-working space Hubud (
hubud.org). The
Pictured:
The Alila Ubud; and Ubud Sacred Monkey Forest
businesstraveller.com
bamboo house has an organic café where flip-flopped writers sit with laptops looking out on to paddy fields, and eager entrepreneurs spend hours coding while drinking kombucha (fermented tea). This summer, Hubud will host a Google-sponsored Startup Weekend for tourism and hospitality ventures. Last year, almost five million people visited Bali, a 23 per cent increase on 2015. Joining high-end international brands such as Aman, Four Seasons, W, Anantara and Oberoi have been two hotels from Ritz-Carlton (the Mandapa, a Reserve property, and the Ritz-Carlton Bali, opened in 2015), the Hoshinoya (January 2017) and the Capella Ubud, which will feature 22 luxury tents when it launches at the end of the year. Asian chain Alila has four properties on the 5,780 sq km island of Bali – the Seminyak, Manggis, Uluwatu and Ubud, where I am staying. The resort is about 20 minutes’ drive from the town of Ubud itself, popular over the years with hippies and backpackers. Along the sides of the streets, which are strewn with tiny trays of flowers and rice as offerings to the gods, are shops selling phallic
NOVEMBER 2017
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