Just walking around Ubud you encounter the most amazing sites. Temples like the one above, the Pura Taman Saraswati, right in the centre of Ubud’s main street. The temple’s architecture honors the Hindu goddess of knowledge and art, Saraswati. In order to enter you need to be wearing a sarong, so I literally hopped into a shop right next door to buy one.
Monkeys all around...
but especially prominent inside the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary (the two photos below).
We found the temple below randomly just while driving down the road...
and often encountered beautiful sights like these, people putting out prayer offerings.
One thing we'd heard about and had to try was "the most expensive coffee in the world" – Luwak coffee, which is made from partially digested coffee cherries that are eaten then pooped out by the Asian palm civet. We didn't know at the time that the traditional method of collecting the feces from wild civets has been replaced in some places by intensive farming methods where they are force-fed the cherries in battery cage systems - #$@! humans.
Retail prices for this coffee can reach $700 per kilogram and it's produced mainly on the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Sulawesi. And there's those farms in the Philippines.
The cup we tried below tasted like extremely strong espresso and honestly was more of a gimmick in my opinion than a tasty cup of coffee. It was an experience to check off the bucket list but given what I learned later I would be careful not to purchase without knowing the origins.
