Lorre Weidlich -- Hyde Park Foreign Affairs Desk

This is the latest in an on-going series of reports by Hyde Park's well traveled friend and neighbor, Lorre Weidlich.

When I decided to visit Bali, I chose Ubud as the place I wanted to stay. Ubud is the cultural center of Bali. Balinese performances take place regularly and Balinese handicrafts are everywhere. Ubud is also beautiful; everywhere are carvings and flowers. In the morning, the Balinese put out offerings -- small containers created from coconut leaves and filled with flowers and sometimes bits of food. Everywhere, including my hotel room and the hotel restaurant, there are decorations made from coconut leaves, with strips woven and curled in different ways.     I spent my first day in Ubud wandering, enjoying the beautiful surroundings. Midmorning it began to drizzle, which only added to the atmosphere. And by midmorning, I had made my way to the Monkey Forest. The Monkey Forest is just that -- a small forest filled with monkeys, cute little guys that scamper around and play with each other, while the forest attendants toss them pieces of banana and sweet potato.     Bali is the land of temples and the Monkey Forest was no exception. I wandered down a stone stairway to the first temple, a grotto containing a cistern of water presided over by three statues of deities, including Ganesha. Then I wandered up another stairway to the cremation temple. This included, to my surprise, a graveyard. Apparently bodies are occasionally buried until funds for a cremation are sufficient or the time is auspicious. The third temple, the major

one, was interesting to me primarily as the site of my (first) monkey misadventure. As I walked from the entrance, one of those cute little guys snatched my dupatta and then began pulling on my churidar. It's not a good idea to touch the monkeys -- they bite -- so I remained still but began calling, in some amusement, for help. Someone came to my rescue and pelted the monkey with stones until it released me and I was able to retrieve the dupatta.     That evening I attended my first Balinese dance at the Ubud Palace. The music was hypnotic and the dancing exquisite. This was only the first; I attended a performance every night I was in Ubud. The dances had different names based on subject matter (Gabor dance, Barong dance, Legong dance), but the style of dance was the same. Perhaps the best-known, the Barong dance focuses on the ubiquitous barong. A barong is a good but mischievous spirit in the form of a lion; each Balinese village has one. Two dancers take the part of the barong, one in front and one behind. The barong dances and then lies down with his paws outstretched. Then monkey comes out and dances, trying to tempt the barong with a banana. In the dance I saw, he picked a young boy from the audience and began grooming him, looking remarkably like the monkeys in the Monkey Forest. Continued on page next_month