There is a version of Bali that appears in almost every itinerary: land at Denpasar, three nights in Seminyak or Canggu, four in Ubud, a day trip to a waterfall, home. It is not a bad holiday. It is simply the same holiday that four million other people took that year, on the same roads, at the same hours.
The island is 145km wide. The version above uses perhaps a fifth of it.
Go east before you go anywhere
Sidemen sits an hour and a half east of Ubud, in a valley of rice terraces below Mount Agung. It looks like the photographs people take of Ubud, except that nobody is standing in them. There are perhaps a dozen small guesthouses, a handful of warungs, and a river you can walk to in twenty minutes.
Continue to the coast and you reach Amed, a string of fishing villages on black sand with a reef fifteen metres offshore. The snorkelling is genuinely good — a sunken Japanese patrol boat sits in five metres of water at Banyuning, coral-covered and swimmable without a boat.
The measure of a good day in east Bali is how little of it you spent in a car.
The highlands are cooler, greener and emptier
Munduk, in the central highlands at around 800m, is the part of Bali that surprises people most. It is cool enough at night to want a blanket. Coffee, cloves and vanilla grow on the slopes, and three significant waterfalls sit within a two-hour walk of each other.
The lake temples — Ulun Danu Beratan and the smaller Ulun Danu Bratan shrines — are up here too. Arrive before eight and you will share Beratan with a handful of photographers and the people who work there. Arrive at eleven and you will share it with nine coaches.
How to actually do it
The practical obstacle is transport. Bali has no useful public transport for visitors and the roads are slow — a map app's ninety minutes is realistically two and a half hours between four and seven in the evening.
Hire a driver for the long transfers rather than a car. It costs around $50 – 60 a day, removes the single biggest source of stress, and means someone else deals with the ceremony that has closed the road you planned to use.
Then stay put. Three nights minimum in each base. The east and the highlands do not reward day trips; they reward mornings, which you only get if you woke up there.
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Bali, Indonesia
