The Monkey Forest

As I was walking through the middle of Bali on my first day, I came across a road called Monkey Forest Road.  I followed it down to the forest, however didn't go in because it was already late afternoon and the gates were closing.  I decided this would be a good walk for the following day.

I started Day 2 in Bali with yoga.  The yoga place was open air and was in a beautiful old Balinese complex.  During my stay there I had 3 different yoga teachers and the first day was definitely the toughest.  However one of the nicest things about these classes was that I got to meet 2 Australian women, one of whom had been to Bali before and had a regular driver here.  She told me I could take her driver one day to explore parts of the island.

After yoga I had breakfast, then set off on the back road to the Monkey Forest.  There are about 650 monkeys who live in this forest - these are the Balinese long tail monkey.  Visitors are told not to feed the monkeys - though there were people selling bananas in the forest.  If you had food the monkeys jumped on you to get it (quite good if you wanted a photo with monkeys - otherwise a bit scary).  The monkeys live in groups and each group occupies a different territory.

The Monkey Forest is also home to 3 Hindu temples dating from the 1350s.  The main temple is known as the Great Temple of Death - here Shiva is worshipped.  There's also the Holy Spring temple and another one near the cemetery where bodies are buried awaiting a mass cremation ceremony that is held once every 5 years.

Beautiful Bali

In the September break I went to Bali.  There was a special cheap offer from Air Asia (though the flights were pretty horrible) and I was recommended a place to stay in Ubud by Jane who went to a yoga class there.  The cottages where I stayed were right opposite the yoga place, so it was very handy for me to do a class there every day.

On the first day I walked around Ubud to try to get my bearings.  I visited several temples and a museum which had some traditional Indonesian artwork.

The first place I went to was the Puri Lukisan Museum.  This is the oldest art museum in Bali.  There were 4 main buildings that specialised in various forms of traditional Balinese paintings and wood carvings.  

The museum was set in beautiful surroundings and had a very tranquil atmosphere.  After spending some time here I continued to walk up the main road to Ubud Palace, which is actually a temple that is famous for music and dancing. 

Ubud Palace, and the temple known as Puri Saren Agung were rebuilt after the 1917 earthquake and the royal family still lives here.

I found the stone carvings all around Ubud very beautiful and ornate.  The doorways were really spectacular.  After the palace I wandered through the local market, and even there everything was very intricate.  Ubud really is a lovely place!

Moonsoon Madness in Mumbai

I've been back in Mumbai around a month and a half now, and it's monsoon season.  We have had a strange end to monsoon with some days bright and sunny (but polluted) and other days with torrential rain.  A couple of weeks ago, at the end of August, Mumbai received the equivalent of a month of rainfall in a single day and the flooding was so bad that I had to spend the night in school with students who were stranded there and could not get home.  Flooding in parts of Mumbai was waist high!  The flooding was part of the general floods that have hit south Asia this year in which already over 1200 people have died.  In Mumbai the situation was made worse by construction on the floodplains and in coastal areas as well as the storm drains being clogged by plastic garbage.

In August I also said goodbye to Sharon, who has been my colleague for the past 5 years.  As she set out for her new adventure in South Africa, we had a farewell drink at the Masala Bar - with some very interesting cocktails!

At the beginning of September it was the yearly Ganpati immersions.  As the flooding was so bad, there was one day where the immersions couldn't happen, which meant that there was a huge amount of idols being immersed on the final day.  The weekend before this Tracy and I went downtown to look at some of the big mandals.  It poured with rain the entire time, but we still had a good time.  One of the Ganpati statues was made entirely of chocolate and another one was only 1 inch high.

On the day of the final immersion we had a half day.  I went up to the Novotel in Juhu with Tara, meeting up with several other ASB faculty there, to see the immersions into the Arabian Sea.  There are always "relics" of previous immersions to be seen on the beach - quite a sad sight - but thankfully some of these are now being made out of eco-friendly materials such as papier mâché which can biodegrade.

I've started to walk - I started this before the summer at Joggers' Park and continued walking at Nowton over the summer.  Generally I try to do 5 kilometres a day.  I'm walking between 6 and 7 pm which is sunset time in Mumbai and I've taken some stunning photos of bright orange, yellow, pink and purple skies.  Last night the entire sky was lit up with colour - and it heralded the most violent of thunderstorms which knocked out all the electricity in my apartment.

Backpacking through the Baltics - Finland

We arrived in Finland early in the morning having taking a ferry across the Baltic Sea from Estonia.  The first thing we did was to walk to our hotel (with our backpacks - it was quite a walk!)  We were too early to check in, so simply left our packs and headed out to explore Helsinki.

Helsinki was established as a trading town by King Gustav I of Sweden in 1550 as the town of Helsingfors, which he intended to be a rival to the Hanseatic city of Tallinn.   After Russia annexed Finland in 1809 the town began to develop, especially when Alexander I moved the Finnish capital to Helsinki in 1812 to bring the capital closer to St. Petersburg.   The downtown area was later rebuilt in the neoclassical style to resemble St. Petersburg.



First we wandered across to the station.  It was a hugely ugly building!  Then we walked down to the Esplanade and along to the harbour, where there was a market.  We then climbed up the hill to the Uspenski Cathedral where we sat on the steps and had some lunch.  The Cathedral  is the largest orthodox church in Western Europe and the views over the city were superb.  We were lucky to see a baptism taking place in the church while we were there.

 

From the harbour area we wandered back towards Senate Square.  On the way Rachel found a seal sculpture - apparently there are 40 of these sculptures, almost 7 feet tall, which have each been decorated by Finnish artists.  They are placed around the city to remind people of the need to protect the Baltic Sea.

Senate Square and its surroundings make up the oldest part of central Helsinki. Landmarks and famous buildings surrounding the square are the Helsinki Cathedral, the Government Palace, main building of the University of Helsinki.  There's also a statue of Emperor Alexander II in the centre of the square, surrounded by figures representing law, culture and peasants.  During the Russification of Finland from 1899 onwards, the statue became a symbol of quiet resistance, with people protesting against the decrees of Nicholas II by leaving flowers at the foot of the statue of his grandfather, then known in Finland as "the good tzar".  After Finland's independence in 1917, demands were made to remove the statue. however nothing came of this and today the statue is one of the major tourist landmarks of the city and a reminder of Finland's close relationship with Imperial Russia.

 The cathedral at the top of the steps is the Lutheran Cathedral, it was built by Tsar Nichalas I and was knows as St Nicholas' Church until the independence of Finland in 1917.  It's a hugely impressive building on the outside, but quite bare inside.  

In the evening Rachel and I went for a walk up to the Sibelius Monument north of the city centre, near the old Olympic Stadium.  It was amazing to see how quickly we got out of the city and into an area that felt quite rural!  On the way back to the hotel we also visited the Botanical Gardens.  It was a lovely sunny evening and we had a pizza in one of the outdoor cafes in town.

Our last day in Helsinki threatened to be rainy so we decided we'd go to visit an art gallery.  As it turned out it was great because there was an exhibition at the Amos Anderson gallery called Generation 2017, which is an exhibition of work by Finland's young artists aged 15 - 23.  Some of the work was really amazing - my favourite being the wooden hawk. The exhibition had works by 42 artists selected through an open call that generated over 1000 proposals. 

We wandered some more - and saw some more seals before catching the bus to the airport for the end of our Baltic adventure!