. He was trying to sell religious statues though, so presumably either felt safe in their presence or knew that he would be going to a better place if the entire structure splintered and went tumbling into the gorge below.

Apart from the variety of liquidised fruit and vegetable drinks here, the main attraction is the Monkey Forest – home to a collection of wild macaques that raid the visitors’ pockets for any secreted food that they can find. We were well ahead of them though and had made sure that anything edible was well on its way to digestion before arriving for our visit – so managed to wander for an hour and escape with a collection of photos of different monkeys eating other people’s fruit in cute looking poses.

As a cultural centre, we are constantly being offered tickets to traditional dance displays in the evening and finally succumbed when we discovered a restaurant in the posh part of town that would feed us and set a time limit on the dance spectacle as well. Happily enough, the dance on offer also had fire in the title so we figured we were on pretty safe ground. With the aid of a story crib sheet we did manage to follow the story of Rhama sending the monkey general to rescue his wife from the underworld, but couldn’t quite figure out why there were 30 half naked men dancing around chanting ‘chak, chak, chak’ for 45 minutes. The food was good, the beer was cold and the dance was at no extra cost so we figured we did quite well out of the whole experience though.  Subscribe |  Follow Me |  Checkout My Facebook |  Register