After having moved a bit around Bali and Nusa Penida in 2023, we found out that staying in Ubud was very useful since Ubud is very central. Namely, staying there 5 to 7 nights and doing small trips to the different places.
Moving around in Bali
The best ways to move from one place to another was to move. First, we planned to hire a car but the company of the car didn't come to the airport to pick us up so we had to change plans. Then, we took an organized Taxi from the airport and we already had to bargain by showing to the official airport Taxi service that the Grab (Application to rent Taxis in South East Asia) was showing 410.000 IDR and they wanted to charge us 500.000 IDR. When we showed that, they said, OK, we will give you the Grab price... Then, we took the normal Taxi driver and his English was very good. He was explaining us a lot of things about Balinese culture and he said that the best way to explore the island is by Motorbike (if you're doing short trips around Ubud) or renting a Taxi driver for the entire day (10h) that will bring you to the main stops or to the places you would like to go. We asked for the price and he actually offered 500.000 IDR (30€). We asked in our property in Ubud when we arrived and they said that it's usually 600k to 700k. Since 500k IDR was very good we decided to book 2 days with the private driver.
And the rest of the days we explored Bali by using a Motorbike grab. We found out that taking a grab car in Ubud costs about 150k to go for example to the rice terraces while taking a grab motorbike costs only 30k IDR (2€). So it's worth it to take 2 grab motorbikes. Moreover, it's much faster because motorbikes can sneak in through the traffic and they just have so much more experience driving in this environment that it is much safer. So every time we took two motorbikes to go to different places. e.g. go from the hotel to the rice terraces, from the rice terraces to the Monkey forest or from the hotel to a massage place.
Moving around in Nusa Penida
Nusa Penida is really beautiful and much more quiet than Bali. We think it's worth it to go there to visit some of the best beaches of Indonesia. The best way to go to Nusa Penida is by boat from Sanur harbor in Bali.
To move inside Nusa Penida you only have two options. Either you rent a private car driver or you rent a scooter. Many people will try to convince you to rent a scooter around the harbor of Nusa Penida at a high price. Instead, you can go to your accommodation and ask to rent a scooter. For us, the price was only of 70k IDR for the entire day (4.5€). And a normal scooter is actually enough for two people to reach everything on the island. Moreover, since there are not so many people as in Bali, it's much easier to rid a motorbike with less risk there. We must say, however, that the state of the road is not very well. It has a lot of potholes. For this I would recommend this post on riding a motorbike in South East Asia that we found very useful.
But if you're brave enough to take the motorbike with these roads you could see something like this:
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