Experience the best of Indonesia
Tours, tickets and the things worth doing, chosen rather than listed.
Curated experiences
A forty-five minute fast boat from Sanur, and a different island entirely once you land: limestone cliffs, hard roads and very little shade. Kelingking Beach is the headland shaped like a dinosaur that everyone photographs; the path down to the sand is steep, rough and much longer than it looks from the top. Most day trips do either the west — Kelingking, Angel's Billabong, Broken Beach — or the east, and doing both in one day means spending it in a car. The crossing is open water and can be rough.
Ubud is the inland Bali people mean when they say they want the other Bali: paddy, temples, craft villages and a monkey forest in the middle of town. It is also busy, and the traffic on the one road through it is the thing nobody photographs. The waterfalls and the terraces are north of the centre and worth the drive. Mornings belong to the walkers and the light; by eleven the tour buses have arrived and the same view is a queue.
An active volcano of 1,717 metres with a caldera lake beside it, climbed in the dark so you are on top when the sun comes up over Lombok. Pick-up is around two in the morning, the walk up takes roughly two hours, and the last stretch is loose volcanic scree. Guides are compulsory and worth it. It is cold at the top and warm again by the time you are down, so bring a layer you do not mind carrying. Jeep trips go most of the way up for anyone not walking it.
Pura Luhur Uluwatu stands on a limestone cliff about seventy metres above the Indian Ocean at the southern tip of Bali, and the sea is the reason to be there. The Kecak is performed in the amphitheatre beside it as the sun goes down: no instruments at all, just a circle of men chanting, and a fire dance at the end. The macaques in the temple grounds are practised thieves — sunglasses, phones and anything loose should be in a bag before you go through the gate.
In Central Java rather than Bali, an hour from Yogyakarta, and worth the flight. Built in the ninth century and then abandoned for centuries under volcanic ash, it carries 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues arranged as a path you walk clockwise and upward. Climbing to the upper terraces now needs a timed ticket and a guide, and the number allowed up is capped, so that part has to be booked rather than decided on the day. Sunrise slots are the ones people fight over.
A cluster of swings, nests and glass platforms built out over the Tegallalang valley north of Ubud, aimed squarely at the camera and entirely unapologetic about it. The valley itself is the real thing — terraced paddy worked by the subak irrigation system that has run here for a thousand years — and you can see it perfectly well from the road for nothing. What the ticket buys is the harness, the drop and somebody to take the picture. Go early: the light is better and the queue has not formed.