Quasar V of Lleyn - Quasar Log

Monday 6^th October

MONKEY BUSINESS IN BALI?

Made, our driver arrives on schedule at 8.30 and we set off on the tourist trail. First off is a musical. Well a musical play ? well according to Ian - a pantomime! It's a real tourist costume thing with a few hundred watching and most of whom wished it was half as long. Fortunately I am tired so nodded off quite a lot! The band consisted of mainly old men playing xylophones with small mason's hammers! They were so robotic; I did think that they could have mistaken for Disney puppets in a theme park! The rest of it was the usual dancers, elephants, tigers and assassins and a story too complicated to recall, but it was a spectacle!

More tourist bits to follow, amazing woodcarving shops, and the artistry is extraordinary, commerciality questionable. There are hundreds of them, like there are abstract paintings shops and silver shops, not to mention hundreds of shops making statues of Buddha and of course the traditional Batik cloth making. Here they have a shop full of manufactured patterned clothes with the tourist bit on the outside of a loom and a machine or two!

Lunch overlooking rice fields was good. Next is the Kedaton monkey forest. Great fun feeding monkeys with bananas. The monkeys in particular seemed to like Ian and he thought he had a new monkey on his back! Anyway they spent some time attaching themselves to him!