How to split a week in Bali

Almost every Bali trip that disappoints goes wrong in the same place, and it goes wrong long before anyone picks a hotel. It goes wrong on the map, at the moment somebody looks at an island 150 kilometres across and assumes that means everything is close to everything.

It isn't, and the reason isn't distance. It's that Bali has essentially one proper road network running through towns rather than around them, and it fills up. A drive that measures forty kilometres can take two hours at four in the afternoon and fifty minutes at seven in the morning. Nothing on a map tells you that.

The number that decides everything

So before the hotels, the honest numbers. These come out of the write-ups on this site, which means they come out of actually making the drive rather than out of a route planner.

• Airport to Jimbaran or Nusa Dua: 15 to 30 minutes. The shortest serious transfers on the island.
• Airport to Sanur: 20 to 30 minutes, and Sanur to Ubud is about an hour — the shortest beach-to-Ubud run there is.
• Airport to Seminyak or Canggu: 30 to 90 minutes, entirely depending on the hour. Canggu can be far worse than that, and people consistently under-budget it.
• Airport to Ubud: 75 minutes to 2 hours, plus another 20 to 45 minutes if you're staying north or west of the town itself.
• Airport to the east coast: 2 to 2.5 hours to Manggis.
• Ubud to any beach: a half-day gone, each way, whatever anybody tells you.

That last line is the one that ruins itineraries. Ubud is not a day trip from the south coast, and the south coast is not a day trip from Ubud. Both are bases, or they are nothing.

Seven nights: three and four

Three nights in Ubud, four on the coast. This is the split that works for almost every first trip, and I would need a specific reason to talk anybody out of it.

Ubud goes first, and the reason is jet lag rather than scenery. You arrive off a long flight, wake at five for three days whether you like it or not, and Ubud is the half of the island that rewards being up early: the valley before the heat, the markets, the walk that is pleasant at seven and unbearable at eleven. By the time your body has reset, you want to lie down near water, which is precisely when you move to the coast.

Put the coast half in Jimbaran or Sanur rather than Canggu, and the final airport run stays short. Amandari and then Four Seasons Jimbaran is the version I would book myself: the valley and the sea, the two things this island does better than anywhere, with a single transfer between them and fifteen minutes to the airport at the end. If the budget is tighter, swap Jimbaran for InterContinental Bali Resort and you lose surprisingly little.

Ten nights: the trip that earns a third base

Four in Ubud, three east, three south. Ten nights is the first length where a third base pays for itself rather than eating the holiday.

The east leg is the one people cut when they're trimming, and it's the one they talk about afterwards. Amankila sits on a cliff above the Lombok Strait two hours from anything, which sounds like a drawback until you're there and realise that's the entire product. Komaneka at Keramas does a gentler version of the same idea, an hour below Ubud and quiet the whole way.

Then back south for the last stretch, near the airport, so your final morning is a breakfast rather than a departure.

Fourteen nights: fewer moves, not more

This is the counterintuitive one. The longer the trip, the fewer the bases.

Two weeks split once, with day trips out of each base, beats four hotels every time. The instinct is to use the extra nights to see more of the island; the better use is to spend them on the places that reward staying put. Soori on the black-sand west coast and Buahan, where the rooms have no walls at all, are both commitments rather than stops. Neither makes sense for two nights. Both are why people come back to Bali a fourth time.

The two ways it goes wrong

There are exactly two failure modes, and they look like opposites while being the same misjudgement about scale.

One area for the whole trip. Usually Seminyak or Canggu for ten nights, with Ubud pencilled in as a day trip. You leave at seven, sit in traffic, arrive somewhere beautiful with three hours to spend in it, and drive back in the dark. You will have seen Ubud the way you see an airport.

Three hotels in ten days. Two nights in Ubud, two in Seminyak, two on the Bukit, two in the east. Every one of those moves costs a morning packing, a transfer through the middle of the day, and an afternoon settling in. Eight nights becomes four nights of actual holiday and you fly home tired.

If you take one thing from this page: choose two areas, move once, and give each half enough nights that unpacking is worth the effort.

Four briefs, four answers

Each of these is what I would book if you gave me the brief and nothing else.

A first trip. Three nights at Amandari, four at Four Seasons Jimbaran. The valley and the sea, no wasted transfer, short run to the airport.

A honeymoon. Capella Ubud or Amandari for the first half, Amankila for the second. Amankila is the half people remember, and the drive east is the only long transfer I would willingly build into a honeymoon. Move once, not twice.

With children. Andaz Bali in Sanur, and stay put for the whole trip. Calm swimmable water, a promenade you can walk with a pushchair, a twenty-minute airport run and Ubud within an hour for day trips. If you want more resort around you, Samabe or the Conrad.

Been before, want something else. Soori or Buahan. Both are the opposite of the south, and both need at least four nights to make any sense.

One last thing about the last night

Wherever you finish, finish close to the airport. A two-hour transfer on the morning of a night flight turns your final day into a logistics exercise, and it is the cheapest mistake on this page to avoid. Jimbaran, Sanur and Nusa Dua all put you within half an hour of departures. Ubud and the east coast do not.