Southeast Asia
Rice terraces, volcano sand, a temple at every gate
The place
Bali is a Hindu island of four million people inside the largest Muslim country on earth, and that single fact explains most of what a visitor notices — the daily canang sari offerings on every doorstep, the split gateways, the Ramayana carved into a temple wall you walk past on the way to breakfast.
There are three Balis and they suit different holidays. The south — Kuta, Seminyak, Canggu — is beach clubs, surf schools and traffic. Ubud, forty minutes inland and three degrees cooler, is rice terrace, art village and a yoga industry. The east and the Bukit peninsula — Uluwatu, Nusa Dua, Sanur — hold the clifftop resorts and the calm water. A honeymoon usually needs two of the three, not one.
The dry season runs April to October and that is when to go; July and August are also the European school holiday, so June and September are the intelligent months. Avoid the days around Nyepi in March — the whole island shuts, including the airport, for twenty-four hours.
Best months
The months in gold are when Bali is at its best — weather, crowds and price together.
Gold = best months to travelDroplets = how wet the month isHigh / low °C
Holiday Packages
Best seller6N / 7D · Flights includedUbud 2N · Seminyak 2N · Nusa Dua 2N
Three very different Balis in six nights — a rice-terrace pool villa at Ubud, a sunset-and-beach-club stretch at Seminyak, and a five-star resort at Nusa Dua, with a Nusa Penida fast-boat day, the Uluwatu Kecak dance and a private candlelit dinner on the sand.
₹90,000 on MakeMyTrip
*Indicative — final price confirmed on live availability.
5N / 6D · Flights includedKuta 3N · Ubud 2N
Bali built around children — a full day at Waterbom, banana boats and parasailing at Tanjung Benoa, the elephant and lion feeding at Bali Safari, and two calmer nights up in Ubud with the rice terraces and the Monkey Forest.
*Indicative — final price confirmed on live availability.
Worth your days
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indicative
Spending money on the ground, per person per day — food, local transport and entry tickets outside your package.
Shoestring
₹1,600
a day, per person
Street food, public transport, one paid sight
Comfort
₹4,200
a day, per person
Sit-down meals, taxis, a tour or two
Luxury
₹14,000
a day, per person
Fine dining, private car, premium experiences
Visa
Practicalities
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Travel Guide
Month-by-month weather, money, plugs, food, shopping and the small things nobody tells you.
