Bali travel guide

Travel to Bali between May – Oct. Those are the months the weather, the crowds and the airfare line up — outside them you trade one of the three.

Currency

Indonesian Rupiah (IDR)

Language

Indonesian and Balinese; good English in the tourist south, less inland.

Time zone

WITA (UTC+8) — 2½ hours ahead of India

Plug type

Type C / F, 230V — Indian round pins fit

Flight time from India

9 hrs

Flying from

Mumbai · Ahmedabad · Delhi · Bengaluru

• 

  Tegallalang terraces and Tirta Empul, in that order

  Reach Tegallalang by seven and you get the terraces in low light with nobody in the frame; by ten it is a queue for a swing. Tirta Empul, twenty minutes on, is a working purification temple where Balinese Hindus bathe under thirty spouts — visitors may join, wearing the sarong provided, and it is the more memorable half of the morning.

• 

  Uluwatu at sunset, and the Kecak fire dance

  The temple sits on a seventy-metre cliff over the Indian Ocean and the Kecak performance starts at six in an open amphitheatre beside it — a hundred men chanting the Ramayana without a single instrument. Book the ticket, arrive by five, and hold on to your sunglasses; the resident macaques are practised thieves.

• 

  Nusa Penida — Kelingking, and an honest warning

  The T-Rex cliff photograph is worth the day, but the crossing from Sanur is forty minutes in open water on a fast boat and it is genuinely rough from November to March. The island roads are broken, the descent to the beach is a rope-assisted scramble, and there is no hospital. Go on a calm-season day or not at all.

• Mount Batur at sunrise

  A two-hour walk up a live volcano, starting at 3.30am with a head torch, ending with eggs cooked in a steam vent and a view over the caldera lake. It is a moderate trek rather than a hard one, but the descent on loose scree is where people turn an ankle — proper shoes, not resort sandals.

• The craft villages: Celuk, Mas, Batubulan

  On the road between Denpasar and Ubud each village does one thing — silver at Celuk, wood carving at Mas, stone at Batubulan. Buy at a workshop where you can watch the work rather than at the Ubud art market, where most of the same goods arrive from Java at three times the price.

• Water sports at Tanjung Benoa, or Waterbom with children

  Tanjung Benoa is the calm lagoon where the banana boat, parasailing and sea-walking packages run, and it suits non-swimmers. Waterbom in Kuta is consistently rated among the best water parks in Asia and is the reliable rainy-afternoon plan for a family.

• Nasi campur and nasi gorengVegetarian

  The everyday plate — rice with several small sides. Ask for it vegetarian and, crucially, tanpa terasi: shrimp paste is the base of nearly every sambal on the island and is not thought of locally as a non-vegetarian ingredient. Kecap manis, the sweet soy, is safe.

• Gado-gadoVegetarian

  Blanched vegetables, tofu, tempeh and a thick peanut sauce — the closest thing Indonesia has to a vegetarian national dish, and excellent. The peanut sauce occasionally carries shrimp paste too, so the same question applies. A serious peanut allergy rules out most Indonesian street food.

• Babi guling — the thing to know about, not order

  Bali suckling pig is the island most famous dish and it is served everywhere, including at buffet carving stations. Because Bali is Hindu, beef is comparatively rare and pork is common — the opposite of what an Indian traveller instinctively expects. Read the buffet labels rather than assuming.

• Pisang goreng, dadar gulung and Bali coffeeVegetarian

  Fried banana and pandan pancakes rolled with palm sugar and coconut — both vegetarian, both sold from a warung for small change. Kopi Bali is served unfiltered with the grounds settling at the bottom, closer to Turkish coffee than to anything in a cafe.

• Indian and Jain food in Kuta and LegianJain friendly

  There is a settled cluster of Indian restaurants around Kuta and Legian doing full thali and Jain preparations with a day notice, and most five-star resorts in Nusa Dua now keep an Indian chef. Ubud has fewer. For a Jain group we take the requirement to the resort kitchen at contracting, not at check-in.

Set a meal preference — vegetarian, Jain or halal — when you book and we brief every hotel and restaurant on your itinerary.

• Silver at Celuk, bought from the workshop rather than the market stall
• Wood carving at Mas — ask for the shipping crate, not hand baggage
• Batik and hand-woven ikat, Threads of Life in Ubud for the honestly sourced version
• Balinese coffee and single-origin cacao; skip kopi luwak, which is a welfare problem and usually fake
• Sarongs, rattan bags and hand-cast brass at Seminyak boutiques
• Bali sea salt from Kusamba, and vanilla pods, both of which travel well

There is no usable public transport. The standard arrangement is a car with an English-speaking driver hired by the day, which costs about the same as three taxi rides and removes every parking and language problem. Grab and Gojek work but are blocked by local transport cooperatives in parts of Ubud and Canggu — you may have to walk to a main road. Scooters need an International Driving Permit and a helmet; the police check both, and Kuta to Ubud is ninety minutes for thirty-five kilometres.

• Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence in March, closes the entire island for twenty-four hours — no flights in or out, no vehicles, no lights, and you may not leave the hotel grounds. It is a remarkable thing to witness and a disaster to arrive into unprepared. Check the date first.
• Rabies is endemic in Bali. Do not touch the beach dogs or the temple macaques; the monkeys at Uluwatu and the Ubud Monkey Forest take sunglasses and phones and will bite for them. Any bite or scratch means a hospital the same day, not on return.
• Rip currents at Kuta, Seminyak, Echo Beach and Canggu are strong enough to kill a confident swimmer. Swim only between the red-and-yellow flags where lifeguards are posted, and never after dark.
• Never leave a passport as a scooter or jet-ski deposit, and photograph the machine before you take it. Indonesian drug penalties are among the harshest in the world and apply to quantities Indians would consider trivial.
• Stick to sealed bottled water from a known brand, refuse ice at roadside warungs, and skip raw salad and pre-cut fruit for the first two days. Most Bali stomach trouble comes from ice and washed leaves rather than cooked food.
• Use ATMs inside a bank lobby or a hotel. Card skimming on street machines in Kuta and Legian is persistent, and Indonesian bank cards do not always support Indian chip-and-PIN cleanly.

Per person, per day, on the ground — meals, local transport and entry tickets. Flights and hotels sit in the package price, not here.