Four days in Ubud: fourteen villages under one name
Three nights in the middle of town, two full days out to the carved sites north and east, and a last morning for the galleries.
- Length
- 4 days, 3 nights
- Where you stay
- Ubud
- Places
- 9 across 4 days
Ubud is not one town. It is fourteen villages that grew into each other, each still run by its own banjar, and the joins show the moment you walk five minutes off the main road: gallery, gallery, gallery, then a compound wall, a split gate, and a woman carrying offerings on her head.
The name comes from ubad, the old Balinese word for medicine, and the valley was a healing place centuries before it was a holiday one. Everything a visitor comes for sits inside that history somewhere, from the bathing pools cut around a spring in the tenth century to the art museums founded by painters who arrived in the 1930s and never went home.
Central Ubud is small enough to cross on foot in twenty minutes and clogged enough that you will want to. The sights that make the place, though, are spread across the rice country to the north and east, which means two of the four days are spent in a car with a driver, out early and back for a late lunch.
Highlights
- The royal palace and the lotus-pond water temple, a hundred metres apart in the middle of town
- Macaques, and a temple of the dead, in the sacred forest at the end of Jalan Monkey Forest
- A cave entered through a carved demon's mouth at Goa Gajah
- Shrines cut into a river gorge at Gunung Kawi, and the purification pools at Tirta Empul
- Rice terraces at Tegallalang, best before nine in the morning
Where to stay
Ubud, three nights
Stay within about ten minutes of the market and the palace. That puts the two central temples, the museums and the good cheap warungs on foot, and it puts you at the pick-up point for every driver and shuttle in town.
Ubud has grown fast and the middle of it strains under the numbers, particularly between ten and five. The villages either side, a few hundred metres down any lane, carry on more or less as they always did: rice, ducks, ceremonies, a gamelan rehearsal audible from three streets away.
Day by day
Day 1 in Ubud
The palace, the water temple and a plate of babi guling
Arrival day starts with lunch, because the one dish Ubud is known for stops being served when it runs out, usually early in the afternoon.
After that, the two things in the centre worth an hour each are a hundred metres apart, and both are free or nearly so. Walk the market lanes between them and you will have the shape of the town by evening.
- 12:30
Warung Babi Guling Ibu Oka 1
EatSpit-roasted pork with rice, crackling and spiced vegetables, served in a room of low tables and floor cushions; order the special if you want the offal and the blood sausage too.
- 14:30
Puri Saren Agung
HistoricThe palace of the kings of Ubud until the 1940s, with descendants of the family still living behind the parts you cannot enter; the open courtyards take a quarter of an hour and cost nothing.
- 16:40
Saraswati Temple
ReligiousA path between two lotus ponds leads to the carved gates of the water temple built for the royal family; late afternoon is when the light finally reaches the reliefs.
With more time: Dance is staged in the palace courtyard most evenings, with tickets sold at the gate during the afternoon and the seats at the front worth the extra. If you land early instead, the ridge path west of town above the Campuhan valley is about an hour there and back and is best in the last of the light.
Day 2 in Ubud
Monkey Forest, Goa Gajah and the Agung Rai collection
The forest sits at the bottom of Jalan Monkey Forest, a twenty-minute walk from the market, and fills up by mid morning, so it goes first. It is a genuine temple complex as well as a monkey enclosure, and the walk through it drops into a ravine with a stone bridge at the bottom.
Goa Gajah is a short drive east, on the road towards Bedulu, and needs less than an hour unless you follow the path down past the pools towards the stream. Come back for the afternoon and one museum: the Agung Rai collection is the one that best explains what happened to Balinese painting when the Europeans turned up.
- 09:00
Monkey Forest
LeisureA sacred grove of long-tailed macaques with a temple of the dead at its southern end; carry no food and nothing loose, because the monkeys work sunglasses and unzipped bags for a living.
- 11:30
Goa Gajah
HistoricYou enter the cave through a demon's mouth carved into the rock face, and find a Ganesha and some fragmentary lingam and yoni inside; the bathing pools out front were only dug out of the mud in the 1950s.
- 13:00
Lunch on the Bedulu road
EatWarungs line the road back towards town and none of them need booking; nasi campur, a coconut, twenty minutes.
- 15:00
Agung Rai Museum of Art
CultureBalinese painters hung beside the European artists who settled here between the wars, with workshops in the grounds and a coffee in the cafe included in the ticket.
With more time: A second set of rock carvings sits in the rice fields a short way east of the cave, far older than it looks and visited by almost nobody, but there is no proper path and you will want a local to walk you across. Ubud is also the easiest place in Bali to spend an afternoon in a kitchen: the cooking classes run from about ten to three and start at the market.
Day 3 in Ubud
Tegallalang, Gunung Kawi and the spring at Tirta Empul
One road runs north out of Ubud through Tegallalang and on to Tampaksiring, and the day is simply that road, taken early. Leave at eight and the terraces are quiet for the first hour of the day.
The two sites at the top sit ten minutes apart and are the reason to make the drive. Gunung Kawi is a long staircase down and a longer one back up, in heat, so do it before the spring rather than after.
- 08:30
Tegallalang
VisitRice terraces stacked up both sides of a narrow valley, with paths down into the paddies; the trinket sellers and the swings are unavoidable, the early hour is what makes it bearable.
- 10:45
Gunung Kawi
Religious371 steps drop through paddy fields into a gorge where shrines stand cut straight out of the cliff, thought to be memorials to King Anak Wungsu and his family and carved in the eleventh century.
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- 12:30
Lunch in Tampaksiring
EatSimple warungs cluster around both car parks, and eating now rather than later matters, because the queue along the spouts is shortest in the middle of the day.
- 13:30
Tirta Empul
ReligiousWater has run from this spring into the bathing courtyard since the tenth century, and Balinese families still work along the row of spouts to purify themselves; bring dry clothes if you intend to get in.
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With more time: The road back is lined with coffee plantations offering a free tasting tray and a paid cup of kopi luwak at the end of it, which is a pleasant twenty minutes and a hard sell. Anyone still awake at half past five can carry on to the village north of Ubud where thousands of egrets come in to roost each evening in the roadside trees.
Day 4 in Ubud
The Puri Lukisan pavilions, then coffee before the airport
The museum on the corner by the market opened in 1954 and lets people in from nine, which fits neatly in front of a midday departure. Three pavilions, an hour, and the carvings rather than the paintings are what stay with you.
Then coffee, and the drive south. Give the road to the airport more time than the distance suggests.
- 09:00
Museum Puri Lukisan
CultureThe first private museum in Bali, opened in 1954, with traditional and modern Balinese work across three pavilions; the English labelling is patchy, so slow down rather than read.
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- 11:00
Seniman Coffee Studio
EatIndonesian beans roasted on the premises and served by people who will talk you through where each one grew, a block downhill from the palace.
With more time: With a late flight, add the museum on the Campuhan side of the river: the house of a Spanish painter who died in 1999, kept as he left it, birds in the garden and a gallery of his work upstairs.
Before you go
Getting in and getting around
Ubud is an hour and a half from Ngurah Rai airport in light traffic and can be twice that when the road through Denpasar seizes up, so book a car and give it plenty of time in both directions. Public bemos run from Denpasar's Batubulan terminal for a few tens of thousands of rupiah, but they thin out through the afternoon and stop altogether by about four, and drivers will push you towards chartering the whole vehicle instead.
There are no metered taxis in Ubud. The cars you will be offered on the street are private drivers, and the going rate for a half day out to the temples is negotiated before you get in, not after. It is the sensible way to do the northern route: one driver, three sites, a waiting fee built into the price.
In the centre, walk. Traffic on the main road is slow and loud, motorbikes use the pavement where there is one, and the pavement is missing in patches. The lanes running off it are quiet within a hundred metres.
Temples, dress and manners
Every temple here is working, not a ruin. A sarong and sash are required, and every site with a ticket office lends or rents them at the gate, so there is no need to buy one from the people selling them in the car park. Shoulders covered, shoes off where you are asked.
At the bathing pools, what looks like a queue is a religious act rather than a photo opportunity. Visitors are welcome to join it, in a sarong, moving left to right and skipping the two spouts reserved for funeral rites. If you would rather watch, watch from the edge and keep the camera down.
When to go
The dry months run roughly from April to October, and July and August are both the busiest and the most pleasant. In the wet season, from November to March, rain tends to arrive as a heavy afternoon downpour rather than an all-day drizzle, which suits an early start and a slow afternoon perfectly well.
Whatever the month, Ubud sits at around two hundred metres and stays cooler and greener than the coast, which is half the reason people come up here.
Four days in Ubud is two days of driving out to carved rock and running water, and two days of doing very little in a town built for exactly that.
The pattern that works is early starts and slow afternoons: temples before the coaches, lunch at a low table, and the last hour of light spent on a ridge path or beside a lotus pond.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- How long does it take to get from the airport to Ubud?
- Between an hour and a half and two and a half hours by car, almost entirely depending on how bad the traffic through Denpasar is. There is no rail link and no direct public bus, so a booked car or a ride-hailing pickup is the practical answer.
- Do I need to hire a car and driver?
- For the two days out of town, yes, or at least a driver for the day. Gunung Kawi, Tirta Empul and the terraces are strung along one road with no useful public transport between them, and a driver who waits costs less than three separate return trips.
- Is four days too long in Ubud?
- No. Two days covers the famous sights and misses the point of the place, which is the hours in between: a market at six in the morning, an afternoon downpour watched from a warung, a gamelan rehearsal you stumble into. If you have longer, use the extra days for the volcano country north of here or the coast to the east rather than for more temples.
- What do I wear at the temples?
- A sarong and sash over whatever you are wearing, with shoulders covered. Ticketed sites lend or rent them at the entrance, so there is no need to buy your own, and the vendors in the car parks are selling you something you are about to be given.
- Can I change the plan once I have copied it?
- Yes. Save it to your own trip and the days, times and places are all editable, so swapping a museum for a cooking class or adding a fourth night takes a minute.