After the reservation mix up on our arrival to Ubud, we had to go back to Bembengan Cottages to check in after our one night stay at Rona’s. Bembengan was the nicest room we stayed in on the entire trip! The room was so comfortable and big.

We immediately agreed to stay 3 nights here. This is the best aspect of not having an iron-clad schedule – when you discover a great deal or wonderful gem of a place, you can stay longer with no problem rescheduling other bookings.

After over 2 months on the road, we have accumulated a decent amount of souvenirs and gifts for friends and family. In addition, Lonely Planet guidebooks of countries we have left (Myanmar, Thailand, Australia) are great souvenirs but also take up precious space and weight allowance in our luggage. With this in mind, we made our way to the post office to prepare a shipment home. The attendant carefully packed and itemized our goods and sealed our box to ship home via boat (it would arrive 2 months later).

With our load lightened, we made our way over to the Monkey Sanctuary Forest.

There are hundreds of macaques that roam around the forested grounds. There are places to buy bananas to feed them and since they expect this, they can be rather pushy when they smell it on you.

They are friendly to people but will fight each other for food. Shannon made the mistake of hiding a banana in her pocket and one of them climbed up her back and stole it.

There are temples and water features on the grounds as well.

After this, we went to Cafe Luna, which is a nice restaurant in town. They also have cooking classes and a night market tour. The night market tour was a new service for them and we signed up and had a drink at the restaurant while we waited. We were the only ones on the tour and went with a driver and our guide, Pandi. We drove about 20 minutes outside Ubud to Gianyar Night Market.

There was a lot of activity and tons of food around! Pandi walked us through the market and explained the name and details of dozens of foods in the stalls. For Shannon and I, who love to eat local food, this was an awesome treat.

We had a guide to explain everything and we could pick anything we wanted to eat. I brought out my recording app on my Iphone and had Pandi say the names of dishes I liked in Balinese so I could repeat it when I needed to in the future.

After snacking our way through the market, we came to the grand finale. Above, you can see the Babi Guling, or roasted pig (sometimes called lechon in spanish), which was our main course. The skin is crispy and the pork marinated and roasted on an open flame. This was fantastically delicious.

There were all kinds of other pig parts on the plate – some better than others. We picked up some desserts and a durian to take home with us too. After this feast, we relaxed in the Bembengan room for the rest of the night.