Ubud: the Valley Guide to Bali's Creative Interior
Rice terraces and river gorges, the island's best farm-to-table cooking, ridge walks and water temples — and the slow mornings the valley is really for.
Ubud is the Bali people mean when they say the island changed them. It sits in the cool green interior, an hour up from the coast, where the land folds into river gorges and terraced rice and the air is ten degrees kinder than the beach. It is the cultural heart of the island — and, lately, the home of its most serious kitchens.
There is a particular quality to stillness here that does not announce itself. It arrives on the second morning, usually around the third cup of coffee, and then it stays. The villas the valley keeps are not, strictly, for doing things; they are for not doing things, quietly, for longer than you thought possible. This is why our editors always argue for five nights in Ubud, not three. Three is a trip. Five is a pause.
The cooking alone justifies the journey. Locavore — for a decade Bali's most acclaimed restaurant — reopened as Locavore NXT, an intimate counter serving an eleven-course tasting menu sourced almost entirely from gardens within eighty kilometres. Around it, a whole hyper-local movement has grown: Hujan Locale for the long lunch, Room4Dessert for the theatre, a dozen warungs the chefs themselves eat at on their day off.
The landscape is the other reason to come. The Tegallalang rice terraces, cut by the thousand-year-old subak irrigation system, are at their photographic best in the pre-dawn light; the Campuhan Ridge Walk — a paved twenty-minute path between two sacred rivers — is the easy, beautiful version of the same scenery, best walked before eight. Further out, the holy spring temple at Tirta Empul and the waterfalls around Bangli reward the guests who drive a little.
Ubud carries its sacredness lightly and everywhere. The Sacred Monkey Forest, twenty-seven acres of banyan canopy and moss-dark temples in the middle of town, is a working religious site as much as a sanctuary; the lotus pond at Saraswati Temple sits right on the main road, behind a café, as if the divine and the everyday had simply agreed to share the address. They do, all over Ubud, and that is the texture of the place.
Stay in the valley, not the town. The houses that matter here hang over the Ayung or the Petanu, oriented so that the bed, the bath and the long table all face the gorge — close enough to Locavore and the market, far enough that the only sound at six is water and birds. It is the house guests ask for again by name, which is the only review that has ever meant anything to us.
You do not wake up in Ubud. The valley wakes you, and you go along with it.
Ubud rewards five nights more than three. Tell the concierge your window and we will check the valley houses before they go.
Good to know
Where is Ubud?
Ubud is in the central highlands of Bali, about a 60–90 minute drive north of the airport and the southern beaches — the cooler, greener, jungle-and-rice-terrace interior of the island.
What is Ubud known for?
Rice terraces (Tegallalang), river-gorge wellness and yoga, farm-to-table fine dining (Locavore NXT, Hujan Locale), water temples, the Sacred Monkey Forest, ridge walks, and the island's densest concentration of art and craft.
How many nights in Ubud?
Our editors recommend five nights over three. Ubud's reward is its stillness, and that takes a couple of mornings to arrive; longer stays are how regulars use the valley houses.
Ubud or the beach?
Many trips do both — a few nights in the valley for the cooking, the culture and the calm, then down to Seminyak, Canggu or Uluwatu for the coast. The concierge can plan the split and the transfer.