Ubud, and the transfer times the map does not show you

At a glance

What this place actually is, and what has been spoiled

Ubud sits inland and uphill from the beach strip, in country cut into steep valleys by rivers running south. It was a royal town and a centre of carving and painting long before anybody arrived to look at it, and the villages around it still specialise: stone here, silver there, masks somewhere else. The landscape is the reason to come. Rice terraces, ravines with fast water at the bottom, footpaths along the ridges between them, and temples at the springs.

What has happened to the middle of the town is not a secret. The central streets have become the island's wellness and yoga market, congested with traffic that the lanes were never built for, and lined with shops selling much the same things. The terraces that appear in every photograph are managed viewpoints with an entrance, a car park and a queue for the same picture. None of that is a scandal — it is what happens to a beautiful small place that becomes famous — but you should know it before you book five nights in the centre.

The distinction that saves the stay is a short one. The town centre is crowded; the valleys are not. A footpath along a ridge twenty minutes from your room, at seven in the morning, is empty. The craft villages on the road north are working places. The water temples early in the day are used by people who came to use them. Stay on the edge rather than in the middle, walk in the first two hours of daylight, and Ubud is still what people say it is.

Where the rest of Bali is

North of the airport the southern strip has been developed to its limits, and traffic there is the first thing islanders complain about. The parts that still feel like the Bali of the brochures are the east coast under the volcano, the north, the terraces in the valleys inland, and the west. They are not far away in kilometres. They are far away in hours, which is the subject of the next two sections and the reason this page exists.

How many nights, and what breaks if you take fewer

Three nights is the floor if Ubud is one base among two on the island. Five is right if it is the only base and the days out are radiating from it. What decides the number is not the list of things to see. It is the road.

The arithmetic the map hides

Reckon the run from Ubud out to Amed on the east coast at 87 kilometres, and at two and a half hours of driving on a good morning, closer to two and three-quarters on most, and longer again once the roads thicken after ten. A room in one of the smaller villages past Amed adds another fifteen to thirty minutes on the end. Leave between eight and ten and you get the short version.

Divide it out and the island runs at about thirty-five kilometres an hour. Apply that rate to whatever distance you have read off a map and the whole plan changes shape: the run down to the southern peninsula, the road north over the mountains and the trip to the west coast are all half-day movements rather than hops. Two of those inside a week is a day of the holiday spent watching the same shopfronts go by, and nobody, ourselves included, has a quicker way through it.

So the rule for a week on Bali is two bases, not three. Ubud and the east coast, or Ubud and the north. Any itinerary offering Ubud, the southern beaches, the east and the west inside seven nights is quietly selling you that road. Add Java or Flores and you are into a different length of trip altogether, which is set out on Indonesia and under how many days.

When to go

The wet months get written off too easily. Rain here mostly arrives late in the day and clears, the valleys are at their greenest, the walking paths are empty and the rates fall away from the July-to-September peak. Give a December week to the valleys, the water temples and the east coast, and let a sunrise over any crater be a bonus instead of the reason for coming, and you have a good week at a considerably better price.

What the wet season will not reliably give you is a clear sky at five in the morning. If the entire trip is arranged around a sunrise off a caldera rim, the months stop being negotiable. Which months suit which corner of Asia is worked out on when to go.

Getting there and getting around

Denpasar takes the long-haul traffic and sits in the far south of the island, which means the arrival transfer is one of the longer drives you will make here and it lands in the busiest part of the road network. Treat the arrival day as an arrival day. Onward flights to Labuan Bajo for the Komodo islands run to roughly an hour and a quarter, on any of several domestic carriers.

Ground transport means a car and a driver, priced at something like USD 35 to 100 for a ten-hour day, fuel and parking usually counted in, and higher from July to September when everybody wants one. The driver is not just a driver: he is the person who knows which road a temple anniversary has closed this morning, and there is no app for that.

What it costs on the ground

Indonesia is a third-band country here: somewhere between USD 250 and 360 for each traveller for each day on the ground, four in the party, with the room, the vehicle, the guiding and the entries inside that figure and no flights. Two charges fall outside it, you settle both yourself rather than through us, and neither takes cash.

The levy is worth two more sentences because it is the charge people arrive without having paid. One payment of IDR 150,000 a head clears your whole time on Bali, and no part of the system will take a banknote: QRIS, a virtual account, a transfer or a card. Settle it on the provincial site before you fly, or at a counter once you land. Never buy either one through a page that adds a handling charge on top — both have official channels, and the price is the price.

No hotel rate appears above. Bali's market moves faster than any published average can follow, so a figure here would be out of date before you read it and any quote we send names the property instead. The day-rate comparison for every country here, with margin stripped out, is on cost by country.

In pictures

When to skip it

• You want beaches and nightlife. Ubud is inland, uphill and quiet after ten, and the strip that sells the other thing is an hour and a half away through the worst traffic on the island. Base yourself in the south and accept what comes with it.
• You have seven nights and want three bases. At about thirty-five kilometres an hour, the third move costs most of a day. Two bases and a longer stay in each is the version of that week that works.
• The centre of your trip is a sunrise off a volcano rim in December, January or February. Those months rarely supply the clear sky at five in the morning that the whole plan depends on.
• The wellness market is not for you. The centre of the town is organised around it now, and while the valleys and the villages are not, you will be walking through the middle of it several times a day if your room is in the middle of it.
• You cannot manage steps and slopes. This is a town built on the sides of ravines: the walks are lovely and almost none of them are level, and the temple compounds have thresholds and stairs.

Journeys that come here

Our ten-day Bali and Java journey gives Ubud three nights and the east coast two, with exactly one long drive between them, and spends the first half on the Yogyakarta plain and the Tengger caldera. It is built on the arithmetic in the section above rather than on a list of places.

The seventeen-day archipelago voyage holds four nights here at the end, after Flores and the Komodo boat days, which is when a base that asks nothing of you is worth the most. For how the islands fit together and what the volcanoes mean for a route, read Indonesia.

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