Ten days in Bali: three bases, because fifty kilometres takes two hours

The drive up from the airport takes between an hour and a half and two and a half hours depending on Denpasar, so most people land in Ubud hungry and slightly stunned. Eat first. The dish to eat is babi guling, and the famous place stops serving when the pig runs out.

After that, the two things in the middle of town are a hundred metres apart and both take under an hour.

The sacred grove at the bottom of the road that shares its name is a temple complex first and a monkey enclosure second, and it fills up by ten. Go at opening, keep your bag zipped, and walk the ravine to the stone bridge at the far end.

Then east on the Bedulu road to a ninth-century cave with a demon's mouth for a doorway, and back for an afternoon in the museum that best explains what happened when European painters arrived here between the wars and Balinese art stopped being anonymous.

One road runs north out of Ubud and threads all three of the day's stops onto it, so this is a matter of leaving early rather than of planning. Eight o'clock puts you on the terraces before the coaches.

The gorge is a long staircase down through paddy and a longer one back up in the heat, so do it before the spring rather than after. Finish at the bathing pools, where the queue along the spouts is worshippers rather than tourists and you are welcome to join it in a sarong.

West and up today, into the crater lakes at around twelve hundred metres, where it is properly cool and often misty before nine. The temple on the lake shore is the one on the fifty thousand rupiah note, and it looks like it floats because the shrines stand on small islands just off the bank.

Above it sits one of Indonesia's four national botanical gardens, big enough to lose an afternoon in, with a bamboo collection and orchid houses. Then down the back road to Jatiluwih, where the terraces run to the horizon under Mount Batukaru and were made a World Heritage site in 2012 for the subak system, the thousand-year-old water co-operatives that still allocate every drop.

Two hours across to the east coast on a road that climbs around the southern flank of Agung, with a stop at Tirta Gangga, a set of terraced pools and fountains laid out by the last king of Karangasem in 1946 and rebuilt after the volcano flattened it in 1963. Stepping stones cross the carp pond, and for a small extra charge you can swim.

Amed is another half hour on. Get in, find the beach, and put your face in the water before the light goes: the reef at Jemeluk starts a few metres from the sand and drops away in a wall.

Twenty minutes up the coast lies one of the easiest great wreck dives anywhere: a US army transport torpedoed in 1942, beached at Tulamben, and pushed off the shingle into the sea by the 1963 eruption. It now lies parallel to the beach in five to thirty metres of water, a hundred and twenty metres of hull furred with coral and patrolled by a resident school of bumphead parrotfish.

You can snorkel the shallow end of it perfectly well. Divers go at first light, before the day boats from the south arrive, and the walk in is over loose black stones, so take the offered help with the tanks.

In the afternoon, the shallower reef back towards Amed is a gentler swim with statues sunk on the sand among the coral.

The gate of Lempuyang looks over Agung, and everybody wants the photograph. The way to enjoy it is to be there when it opens, take the picture, then keep walking: the temple in the trees above the gate is the real one, and the full climb to the summit shrine runs to well over a thousand steps and takes most of a morning.

Down on the coast are two water palaces built by the same royal family, both wrecked by the 1963 eruption and only one of them rebuilt. The unrestored one is the more atmospheric: broken bridges, empty pools and a view down to the sea.

A little over two hours south along the coast road, past Padang Bai and Candidasa, and into the traffic of the south. Sanur comes as a shock after Amed: pavements, cycle lanes, coffee that costs money.

The afternoon is for two small things at opposite ends of the district. One is a Belgian painter's house on the beach, kept much as he left it. The other is a stone pillar standing in a temple courtyard a little further south.

The limestone peninsula hanging off the south of the island is nothing like the rest of Bali: dry, scrubby, ringed with cliffs and cut by steep stairways down to beaches you cannot see from the road. An hour from Sanur, and a full day.

Take the beaches in the morning while the tide is out and the sun is behind you, eat somewhere on the cliff, and give the temple the end of the afternoon. The kecak, a hundred men chanting the Ramayana with no instruments at all, is performed in the amphitheatre beside it as the sun goes down, and tickets sell out in high season.

Sanur faces east, so the last morning starts with the sun coming up over the water and the beach path full of walkers, cyclists and old men doing tai chi. Twenty minutes on foot before breakfast is the right way to leave.

The airport is twenty to thirty minutes away outside rush hour and an hour inside it. Leave more time than the map suggests.