Sacred Forest

by Carmen larranaga calderon (Spain)

I didn't expect to find Indonesia

We need to place ourselves in the winter of 2018 when I decided to travel around Asia for four months. I was with my girlfriend at that time. We started in India, then Sri Lanka and then, where this story get place, Indonesia. So we arrived to Bali, and after been in many different Islands with no tourist at all we were happy to see some blond hairs. We wanted to go out and drink some beers. We tried some surfing, and then we head to Ubud, a lovely region full of sacred temples. One of the most liked places over there is the Monkey Forest, where tourists go there to take monkey photos, and play with them. I was quite anxious but exited, because I feel for monkeys love/ hate kind of feeling. So me and my partner were all exited because they had cute babies, some tourist were feeding them, I thought it was quite dangerous, because monkeys can be aggressive. So I was staring at them, sitting on a chair, when a monkey climbed me and sat on my back. everyone was staring and laughing, but I was quite nervous and tried to set apart the monkey with my hand, when suddenly it bite my finger. I was panicking and tried harder to move the monkey away from me. for delight of everyone who was looking and laughing at me, the monkey jumped on my chest and started trying to bite my chest. My eyes were full of tears already. I didn´t knew what just happened, I just knew I wanted to cry. My partner and I went to a corner while everyone was laughing and staring to do damage control. two clear bites on both of my chest, teeth marks and bleeding... I started laughing and crying because of the situation. I asked one of the workers over there, if the monkeys had any health checks. Apparently they were all healthy so we went to have some lunch. But I was worried about rabies, so we contacted our insurance. My poor girlfriend had to drive me in a cheap scooter for and hour at night time, to the other part of the Island, where the hospital was. Drs and nurses were all laughing because of my war wounds, but they finally gave me the vaccine. The bad news was that I needed two more doses. And I was not going to be in Indonesia and my insurance expired in 3 weeks. So the second doses took place in Hong Kong, no problems at all, the insurance got it cover. But with the third dose, we were in the China region of Xian with no insurance and full of chinese peolple with no idea of english. The day of the vaccine, we placed ourselves in a public hospital ( it looked like if the country were on war ) and with google translator ( thanks again google) we manage to communicate with a girl, who without telling us anything putted us in a taxi and gave the driver some directions. I was worried we were being kidnapped, but when you are travelling you had to trust people. the taxi driver left us in a place that for me was looking as a closed shop. So me and my girlfriend stayed there for an hour, waiting for it to opened. When it did, I tried to use google translator again, the woman who was behind the desk didn´t even read was I was typing and said "ok ok" and gave me some direction to gop to the flowing room. Over there, what I want to think it was a nurse, was burning a needle, and two minutes later was injecting me something!! At this point I have to say, that I don´t know what they gave me in China, but I didn´t get the rabies and I don´t have an ETS neither. So I am happy to say that everything turned out just great.