One of the most popular tourist activities in Ubud is to visit the Sacred Monkey Forest. The Sacred Monkey Forest is a small patch of land that remained lush with vegetation and is said to be the home of 115 species of trees. Aside from the local flora, there’s also a lot of monkeys or long tail macaques that can be found here.
It is said that there are more than 340 long tail macaques in the Sacred Monkey Forest. This small patch of forest is being maintained to provide a home for these monkeys.
Tourists are allowed to go inside the forest and are not prohibited to provide bananas to the monkeys. Banana sellers can be found at the entrance gates of the monkey forest.
Here are some tips to help you survive your trip to the Sacred Monkey Forest in Ubud.
1. Don’t hide food from the monkeys: These monkeys can smell if you have fruits or any kind of food in your bag.
2. Secure Your Bag: Make sure that you don’t have an unlockable sling bag when you enter the forest. These monkeys are known to take things from tourists especially “shiny stuff”.
3. Give the bananas without the plastic bags: These plastic bags will just litter the park.
4. Stay Calm and Don’t Panic: Some monkeys are very excited when they see people holding a banana. Some of them jumps on unwary tourists and take the banana from your hand, some will even search your bags for more food. If this happens, just stay calm and the monkey will eventually leave you alone.
5. Don’t touch the monkeys: Even if they’re already used to seeing people, they are still wild animals and might bite if they fell threatened. Keep your distance.
6. Please don’t leave your trash behind.
7. Be ready to see copulating monkeys. This is their territory so they could do whatever they want (LOL!). I’m not sure if it was their mating season or what but when I was there, a lot of them were having sex everywhere.
8. Be careful when you descend to some parts of the park. It might get slippery especially when it’s raining.
9. There are couple of temples inside the sacred Monkey Forest and they’re still being used by the locals. Pay respect especially when there’s a ceremony.
10. And as what everybody says, Take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints.
Wishing Well inside the Sacred Monkey Forest
Those monkeys are horrible! They attacked me so many times, they just love me
But I don’t like them …
Too bad I read this guide 6 months too late. We were so scared because it seemed the monkeys would attack or bite us. It was really hard to keep calm with all the monkeys around. Im sure a lot of people will find this useful!
i sort of fancy at the thought of coming here and feed them however I got the scare of my life when I saw monkey nearly attack a tourist when he attempted to touch the monkey while at the Bayon temple in Angkor hehe.
Thanks for this Plif, indeed very useful.
the monkeys are really funny hehe, havent seen anyone attacked by them… although they do grab the bananas from your bag so best to give it to them right away so they wont follow you anymore