Experience at the Sacred Monkey Forest   

Ubud Bali 

The Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary 

My experience 

When you say the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary normally everybody knows where is it in Bali because this is a popular place where tourists are gathering to feed monkeys. The Sacred Monkey Forest has a mission which is conserving the area based on the concept of Tri Hita Karana. Indeed, the Sacred Monkey Forest tend to be a peaceful and harmonious tourist destination for visitors, and also be a natural laboratory for educational institutions with different plants such as rare plants. This is an important spot for research and conservation programs especially in the monkey’s social interaction and behaviour with their surrounding environment.n I have been twice in the Monkey Forest in Ubud on the island of Bali. This forest is not only full of monkeys but as mentioned above this is full of tourists. Apart from this aspect, I liked this place for especially its serenity as well thanks to its temple, which is the middle of the Monkey Forest. It gives a little bit of peace with a noisy and electric crowd all around. Indeed, monkeys have a particularity, which is creating euphoria or fear among tourists by jumping on tourists’ backpacks to steal phones or anything else that could be interesting to them. I experimented with a monkey that has jumped on my backpack whereas I was waiting for taking a picture of a monkey’s group. Funny! This forest is a popular place in which tourists like to have a nice time among monkeys especially by feeding them. There are 600 monkeys divided into 5 groups with 100 up to 120 monkeys of different ages that may explain the different conflicts between groups. In term of nature, I found that this forest was particularly luxurious. In this forest, you will find a temple, which is not permitted to come in except for people who want to pray. The aim of this visit was taking photographs of monkeys, which I didn’t do when my first visit. You can see my work thanks to the photos below.

Photography 

In term of photography, my aim was to be able to photograph those monkeys in their natural habitat. I wanted to show them in their habitat even if this forest is a touristic attraction. Nevertheless, this forest is still the home of 600 monkeys. It was completely normal for me to photograph them in order to represent them better in their natural habitat.