Bali: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Bali is the only Hindu-majority province in a country that is nearly ninety per cent Muslim, and the reason is a refugee movement: when the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire of Java collapsed in the face of Islam around 1500, its priests, nobles, musicians and sculptors moved east to Bali, which means Balinese high culture is a preserved Javanese court culture. Ubud became its modern centre in the 1930s, when the local royal family invited the German painter Walter Spies and the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet to live here and they began teaching and collecting — Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were working nearby at the same time. Everything in this walk is within two kilometres and all of it is on foot, which in Bali is itself unusual. Two hours. Go from seven: by nine the main street is a traffic jam and there is no pavement on half of it.

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A short history of Bali

Hinduism reached Bali from Java, and when the Hindu Majapahit kingdom there collapsed, in the 15th and 16th centuries, many of its courtiers, artists and priests fled to Bali. This is how Bali remained a Hindu island within Muslim Indonesia. In 1906 the king of Badung and his court, dressed in white, marched towards the Dutch guns, and hundreds of them were killed in a ritual suicide known as puputan, and in 1908 the scene was repeated in Klungkung. In 1963 Mount Agung erupted and more than a thousand people were killed. On 12 October 2002 car bombs exploded at nightclubs in Kuta, and 202 people were killed.

The ten best sights in Bali

1
Pura Besakih
The mother temple on Agung’s slope. 150,000 rupiah, and it includes the compulsory guide, sarong and shuttle — refuse anything else offered. Verified 10/2026
2
Tanah Lot
A sea temple on a rock, sixteenth century; about a third of the rock is 1980s reconstruction
3
Uluwatu Temple
On a 70-metre cliff. 60,000 rupiah for the temple and the kecak is a separate 150,000 — it is not included. Verified 10/2026
4
Tirta Empul
A spring temple of 962 AD with thirty spouts; Balinese come to bathe, and it is not a swimming pool
5
Goa Gajah
The elephant cave, eleventh century, rediscovered in 1923 — and there have never been elephants in Bali
6
Yeh Pulu
A 25-metre fourteenth-century relief carved into a cliff in a rice field; ten minutes from Goa Gajah and empty
7
Gunung Kawi
Eleventh-century royal tombs cut into the rock faces of a river gorge; 315 steps down
8
Taman Ayun, Mengwi
A 1634 royal temple in a moat, UNESCO listed as part of the subak landscape
9
Ulun Danu Beratan
The lake temple on the 50,000-rupiah note; it is the water temple at the top of a whole subak system
10
Pura Lempuyang
The gates of heaven photograph: the reflection is a mirror held under a phone, and the queue is two hours

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A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Bali:

Free walking tours in Bali

Ubud on foot

Ubud Palace · Puri Saren Agung is still the home of the Ubud royal family — they have no political power but a great deal of authority, and it was this family that invited the European painters in the 1930s and effectively invented Ubud as a cultural destination. The outer courtyards are open and free during the day. Most evenings there is a dance performance in the courtyard, and the gamelan playing for it is a village orchestra from one of the surrounding banjar, not a hired troupe.
Pasar Ubud · Two markets in one building at different hours: before about eight in the morning it is the real produce market for the surrounding villages — vegetables, ducks, offerings, flowers sold by weight for the daily canang sari — and after that the ground floor turns over to sarongs and carvings for visitors. Almost everything on the craft floor was bought wholesale at Sukawati, nine kilometres south, for a third of what you will be asked here.
Pura Taman Saraswati · A temple to Saraswati, goddess of learning, set behind a long pond of pink lotus, and it is not ancient: it was designed in the 1950s by I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, a sculptor and architect who lived to around a hundred and twenty and whose drawings are in the Puri Lukisan museum two minutes away. He also carved parts of the palace. There is a dance performance here in the evenings with the pond and the gate behind the dancers.
Museum Puri Lukisan · Founded in 1956 and the oldest art museum on Bali, and it exists because of a specific problem: by the 1930s the best Balinese paintings were being bought by visitors and leaving the island, so Rudolf Bonnet, the prince of Ubud and the Balinese artists’ co-operative set out to keep a collection here. What it shows is the moment of contact — Balinese painters who had worked only on temple cloth in flat registers learning perspective and single-subject composition, and then doing something with it that was neither Balinese nor European.
Monkey Forest · Twelve hectares of forest with three fourteenth-century temples in it and around 1,200 long-tailed macaques living there, and the animals are the reason to be careful rather than the reason to come: they are habituated, they are fast, and they will go into a bag or take glasses off a face. Do not carry food, do not make eye contact and do not pull back if one takes something. The forest is owned by the village of Padangtegal and the ticket money runs it.
The Campuhan ridge · Campuhan means the meeting of two rivers, and the path runs for two kilometres along the narrow ridge between the Wos Barat and the Wos Timur — which is a sacred confluence in Balinese terms, and the temple at the junction, Pura Gunung Lebah, is one of the oldest foundations in the area. The path is paved, it is a genuine ridge with drops on both sides, and there is no shade at all: it is a walk for six in the morning and it is empty at that hour.

The river temples: Bedulu and Pakerisan

This is the oldest layer of Bali and it is not Balinese-Hindu as the island now practises it: these are eleventh-century sites from the Warmadewa dynasty, cut into the cliffs of two river gorges, and the iconography on them is Hindu and Buddhist together in a way that later Bali separated out. The whole group was listed by UNESCO in 2012 as part of the Cultural Landscape of Bali — not as monuments but as part of the subak, the thousand-year-old irrigation cooperative in which water temples allocate river water among farmers by religious authority rather than by law. Be clear about one thing: this is not a continuous walk. The sites are between two and twelve kilometres apart and you need a driver for the day; each one is then a walk of ten minutes to half an hour. Half a day, and start at eight.

Goa Gajah · The elephant cave, carved in the eleventh century, and the name is a puzzle: there have never been elephants in Bali. The most likely explanations are the river it stands by, once called Lwa Gajah, or the Ganesha figure inside. The cave mouth is a demon face you walk into through its mouth, and the T-shaped chamber behind holds a lingga and a Ganesha together — Shaivite Hindu and Buddhist in one room. The bathing pools in front were only dug out in 1954; the site itself was rediscovered by a Dutch official in 1923.
Yeh Pulu · Ten minutes’ walk through rice fields from Goa Gajah and almost nobody goes: a twenty-five-metre relief cut into a cliff in the fourteenth century, showing a sequence of ordinary life — a man carrying water, a boar hunt, a woman pulling a horse. There is no inscription and no agreement on what it depicts, which is unusual for Javanese-Balinese art of the period, and that is exactly what makes it interesting: it is a narrative with the text missing.
Gunung Kawi · Three hundred and fifteen steps down into the Pakerisan gorge, and at the bottom are ten candi — shrine façades — carved directly out of the living rock faces on both sides of the river, each about seven metres high, from the eleventh century. They are not buildings: they are reliefs of buildings, cut out of the cliff, and they are thought to be memorials to King Anak Wungsu and his family. Working monks still live in the complex. The walk back up is the hard part.
Tirta Empul · A spring temple founded in 962 AD, and the spring is the point: it feeds two rectangular pools with around thirty carved spouts, and Balinese come here for melukat, ritual purification, moving down the line of spouts in order and skipping two that are only for the dead. It is a working religious act and not an attraction, so the etiquette matters — sarong, enter the water only if you intend to pray, and do not photograph people’s faces. On the hill above, Sukarno built a presidential villa in 1954 that looks straight down into the pools, which Balinese did not forget.
Pura Kehen, Bangli · Eleventh century, built in eight rising terraces up a hillside with a flight of steps the whole way, and the detail to look for is in the walls of the lowest terrace: Chinese porcelain plates set into the stone as decoration. They are real imported plates, and they are evidence of how far the trade reached and how long ago. A banyan tree grows out of the first courtyard with a kulkul, a slit drum used to call the village, built into its branches.
Penglipuran · A single paved street climbing a slope with seventy-six house gates on it, all the same height, the same width and the same materials, because the village’s awig-awig — its customary law — says so and has said so for centuries. Behind the houses is a bamboo forest that is communally owned and from which all the building material comes. The village is also one of the Bali Aga settlements that predate the Majapahit arrival, which is why the layout is nothing like a south Balinese village.

The south: Kuta to Canggu

Bali got its first surfers in the late sixties, its first charter flight in 1970 and its first hotels on Kuta beach shortly after, and the strip that runs north from there — Kuta, Legian, Seminyak, Canggu — is now where most of the island’s six million annual visitors sleep. This walk is deliberately the uncomfortable one: it is the tourism itself, including the memorial to the 202 people killed by bombs in Kuta in 2002, the beach clubs built on what was rice field in 2010, and the water problem underneath all of it. You can walk the whole thing on the sand at low tide, which is the only way to do it: the roads behind have no pavements and the traffic is the worst on the island. Two and a half hours, from four in the afternoon, ending at sunset.

Kuta Beach · Kuta was a fishing village with a notorious reputation among Balinese — it is kelod, seaward, the direction of impurity in Balinese cosmology, and the land was cheap because nobody local wanted it. Australian surfers arrived from the late sixties, the airport opened to wide-bodied jets in 1969, and within fifteen years it was the busiest beach in Southeast Asia. The shore break here is gentle and sandy, which is why every surf school on the island is in these few hundred metres.
Ground Zero Monument · On the night of 12 October 2002 two bombs went off on Jalan Legian, one inside a bar and a much larger car bomb outside a club across the road; 202 people were killed, of whom 88 were Australian, 38 Indonesian and the rest from twenty other countries. The monument lists every name by nationality. The attack was carried out by Jemaah Islamiyah; three men were executed in 2008. Bali’s tourist economy collapsed for about two years and the island’s dependence on it became a political question that has not been resolved.
Jalan Legian · The single road that runs the length of Kuta and Legian, and it is the clearest place to see what happened to this coast in fifty years: surf shops, tattoo studios, money changers, bars, and almost nothing older than 1980. The money changer point is practical and worth knowing — the scam here is a rigged calculator or a sleight-of-hand recount, so use an authorised changer with a fixed storefront and count the notes yourself before leaving the counter.
Seminyak · Seminyak was the next village north and it went upmarket in the 2000s rather than down: villas instead of hostels, and beach clubs — a Bali invention in its current form — charging a minimum spend for a day bed on the sand. The land here was rice field inside living memory, and the subak that irrigated it has in several places been cut by development, which is the mechanism by which the terraces disappear: not one big decision but a sequence of small ones.
Canggu · Fifteen years ago this was rice fields with a dirt track to a black-sand beach; it is now the remote-work capital of Southeast Asia, with the traffic and the rents to match. The black sand is volcanic and it gets genuinely too hot to walk on barefoot by eleven. The underlying problem here is water: southern Bali draws so much groundwater for hotels, pools and villas that seawater has intruded into the aquifer in places, and the island’s water table has been falling for two decades.
Tanah Lot · Twelve kilometres beyond Canggu and the obvious place to end the day, and the honest fact about it is that the rock is partly artificial: by the 1980s the sea had eroded the base so badly that the temple was at risk of falling in, and a Japanese loan paid for a reconstruction in which around a third of the rock was rebuilt in concrete faced with stone. It is still a functioning sea temple, one of a chain along this coast, each positioned to be visible from the next.

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Getting to Bali and getting around

Ngurah Rai Airport · In Tuban between Kuta and Jimbaran; it shuts completely for the 24 hours of Nyepi, once a year
Sanur Harbour · The fast boats to Nusa Penida and Lembongan leave from the beach here; 45 minutes and often rough
Padangbai · The ferry port for Lombok and the Gilis; the slow ferry is four hours and the fast boat ninety minutes
Gilimanuk · The far west end of the island and the ferry to Java; ninety-eight kilometres and four hours by road
Benoa Harbour · The cruise and yacht harbour south of Denpasar; the Lombok and Komodo liveaboards also sail from here
Ubung Terminal · The Denpasar bus terminal for Java and the north; there is no railway anywhere on Bali

Cheap eats in Bali

Balinese food is not Indonesian food with a beach: it is a ceremonial cuisine that happens to be sold in warungs, and most of the signature dishes exist because they were made for temple festivals and then became everyday. It is also the only Hindu cuisine in the world built on pork, because the island is Hindu but not vegetarian and the pig is the ceremonial animal. Two things to know: a warung is a family kitchen with four tables and it is where the food is, and the base gede — the spice paste of galangal, turmeric, chilli, shallot, candlenut and shrimp paste — is what makes everything taste Balinese. Twenty-five to sixty thousand rupiah, two to four dollars.

Babi guling · Suckling pig, a ceremonial dish eaten at lunch; three dollars, and the good places sell out by one
Bebek betutu · Duck packed with spice, wrapped in banana leaf and cooked for eight hours; order it a day ahead
Sate lilit · Minced fish and coconut wrapped around a lemongrass stick and grilled; a dollar for ten
Nasi campur · Rice and six small things on one plate; two dollars, and the cheapest honest meal on the island
Lawar · Minced meat, grated coconut, spice and sometimes fresh blood; ask which version you are getting
Bali coffee · From Kintamani, grown between coffee and tangerine trees; and a word on the civet coffee
Jimbaran grilled fish · Tables on the sand at sunset; it is the postcard and it costs three times a warung
Warung nasi at Pasar Badung · The cooked-food floor of the big Denpasar market; a dollar and a half and no English
Arak · The palm spirit, distilled in villages; buy branded bottles only — bad arak has killed people
Canang sari · Not food: the palm-leaf offerings on every pavement and doorstep. Do not step on them

Museums in Bali

Bali has an unusual museum situation: there is almost nothing about Balinese history and a great deal about Balinese painting, because the island’s most documented moment is the 1930s encounter between Balinese artists and two European painters who settled in Ubud. Four museums within a few kilometres of each other hold that story, and they are better than they sound. The one museum about history, in Denpasar, was built by the Dutch immediately after they conquered the south — which makes it a document twice over.

Museum Puri Lukisan · The oldest art museum on Bali, 1956, in a garden in the middle of Ubud; an hour and a half
Neka Art Museum · The clearest arrangement: seven pavilions that show the sequence rather than the highlights
ARMA · In Pengosekan; the only Walter Spies paintings on public display in Indonesia are here
Blanco Museum · Antonio Blanco’s own house and studio above the Campuhan river, left as he kept it
Setia Darma House of Masks · Over a thousand masks and puppets from across Asia in seven old buildings; free and empty
Bali Museum, Denpasar · Built 1910–32 by the Dutch after the conquest; four pavilions, one per old kingdom
Subak Museum, Tabanan · A small museum of the irrigation system; it explains the terraces better than the terraces do
Kertha Gosa, Klungkung · The royal court of justice; the painted ceiling shows the punishments of hell as case law

Holy places in Bali

Balinese Hinduism is not Indian Hinduism: it absorbed a pre-existing ancestor cult and animism whole, and what it worships is local — village founders, mountains, springs and the rice goddess, within a Shaivite framework. Every household has a temple, every village has three, and there are estimated to be over twenty thousand temples on an island of 5,600 square kilometres. The practical consequences for a visitor: a sarong and sash at every temple, menstruating women are asked not to enter, never stand higher than a praying person or with your back to a shrine for a photograph, and do not step on the offerings.

Pura Besakih · The mother temple on Agung’s slope; take an official guide and refuse everything else offered
Uluwatu Temple · A cliff temple and the kecak at sunset; book the kecak, and watch the monkeys not the view
Tirta Empul · The spring temple of 962 AD; enter the water only if you intend to pray, and do not photograph faces
Tanah Lot · A sea temple on a rock a third of which is 1980s concrete; sunset, and expect a crowd
Ulun Danu Beratan · The lake temple on the banknote; it is the water temple at the head of a subak system
Goa Lawah · The bat cave temple on the east coast; it is a funerary temple and ceremonies are frequent
Pura Luhur Batukaru · A forest temple on the second-highest mountain; one of the nine directional temples and nearly empty
Brahmavihara Arama · The main Buddhist monastery, in the north hills, with hot springs ten minutes away

Nature and day trips near Bali

Bali is a volcanic island 95 kilometres across with a chain of peaks down the middle, and that single fact produces everything else: the mountains make the rain, the rain makes the rivers, the rivers cut gorges and are tapped into the subak, and the volcanic soil is why three rice harvests a year are possible. The north coast is in the rain shadow and is dry; the south is wet. Balinese directions are not north and south but kaja, towards the mountain, and kelod, towards the sea. Note two practical things: the rainy season runs roughly November to March, and the island has a real water shortage caused by tourism.

Mount Agung · 3,031 metres and the axis of Balinese cosmology; it last erupted seriously in 2017–19
Mount Batur · The sunrise climb from two in the morning; two hours up, and the guide is compulsory and local
Jatiluwih · Six hundred hectares, UNESCO listed, two hours from Ubud and a tenth of Tegallalang’s crowd
Sekumpul Waterfall · Seven falls in a gorge in the north; a steep hour down and back, and a guide is now required
Nusa Penida · Limestone cliffs and manta rays; the roads are dangerous and a scooter here is not casual
West Bali National Park · The far west; the Bali starling is endemic and was down to single figures in the wild

Things to do in Bali with kids

Bali is one of the easiest places in Asia with small children: the beaches are sandy and shallow in places, Balinese treat children as public property in the best way, and almost every hotel has a pool. Three warnings that matter more here than the attractions. Rabies is endemic and present in dogs and monkeys, so a bite or a scratch means a clinic the same day. The surf on the west coast has rip currents and a flagged beach with lifeguards is worth choosing. And a scooter with a child on it is how most tourist injuries on this island happen.

Bali Bird Park · Two hectares at Batubulan, around 250 species, and shaded all the way through
Bali Safari Park · A drive-through park at Gianyar; large, expensive, and the night safari is the better version
Sanur beach path · Five kilometres of paved path along a reef-protected beach; flat water and bikes to hire
Pandawa Beach · Calm, shallow and sheltered by cliffs; the best swimming beach in the south for small children
Monkey Forest · Children love it and the monkeys bite; hold hands, carry no food, and do not let a child feed them
Tegenungan Waterfall · Fifteen minutes from Ubud with steps down and a pool you can stand in; busy and easy

Nightlife in Bali

There are three separate nights on Bali and they barely overlap. Kuta and Legian are the old loud strip, cheap and aimed at twenty-two-year-olds. Seminyak and Canggu are the beach clubs and the restaurants, with a minimum spend and a dress code. And Ubud essentially closes at eleven and offers dance performances instead, which is a real alternative rather than a consolation. One date matters more than all of this: on Nyepi, the Balinese new year, the entire island shuts for twenty-four hours — no flights, no vehicles, no lights, nobody outside, and that applies to visitors in hotels too.

Nyepi · One day a year the whole island stops for 24 hours — airport closed, and you stay in your hotel
Seminyak beach clubs · A minimum spend for a day bed and a dress code after seven; the sunset is the product
Canggu · Younger and cheaper than Seminyak; the traffic on the one road in is the real cost
Jalan Legian, Kuta · The loud cheap strip; and a warning worth repeating — never buy unbranded arak
Ubud dance performances · Legong, Barong or kecak most evenings at the palace and at Taman Saraswati; buy on the day
Uluwatu kecak at sunset · A hundred men chanting with no instruments, on a cliff at six; book it, it sells out

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Frequently asked questions about Bali

What is there to see in Bali?

The top sights in Bali are Pura Besakih, Tanah Lot and Uluwatu Temple. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Bali?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Bali without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Bali?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Bali, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Ubud on foot.

How do you get to Bali and get around?

The main ways are Ngurah Rai Airport, Sanur Harbour and Padangbai. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Bali, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Bali that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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