3 Nights in Ubud, Bali — What I Did, Where I Stayed, and the Best eSIM for Ubud

I did not plan to spend three nights in Ubud. I planned one.

I had been based in Sanur for two weeks — working remotely, managing things from a villa near the beach, using the promenade for morning walks before the laptop came out. It was comfortable, it was easy, and it was the kind of travel that barely feels like travel at all. Then someone in a café mentioned Ubud almost as an afterthought — "you should go, even just for a couple of nights" — and I booked a guesthouse on my phone that evening and was on a Gojek north the next morning.

Three nights turned into exactly what they needed to be. Here is what happened, where I went, and what I would tell anyone planning the same trip — including the part about finding the best eSIM for Ubud, which matters more up here than it does in the south.

Arriving in Ubud — and Why Your Phone Matters Immediately

The drive from Sanur to Ubud takes about 45 minutes if traffic is moving, an hour and a half if it is not. My Gojek driver took the quieter inland route through Gianyar, past rice fields and roadside temples and dogs sleeping in the middle of the road with the total confidence of animals that have never been rushed anywhere in their lives. I had Google Maps open the entire way, watching our progress through a landscape that feels like it belongs to a different century than the one Kuta is operating in.

This is the first thing to know about Ubud: navigation requires data. The town itself is not hard to understand — there is essentially one main street, Jalan Raya Ubud, with Monkey Forest Road running south from the palace — but the accommodation, restaurants, and coworking spots that make Ubud worth visiting are scattered across a network of unmarked lanes, rice paddy paths, and small villages with names I could not pronounce on first attempt. Without Maps, finding your guesthouse is the kind of adventure that is charming in retrospect and frustrating in real time.

I had installed my BaliSIM eSIM before flying into Bali, so this was not a problem. Telkomsel coverage across Ubud town is solid, and I had not thought much about it until the driver missed a turn, we ended up on a narrow concrete path between two villa compounds, and I navigated us back out with one hand while holding my bag with the other. Not dramatic. But useful.

I dropped my bag, ate the breakfast that appeared on my terrace without being asked for (rice, tempeh, a banana, coffee that had been sitting on the flame long enough to be very serious about itself), and walked into town along the Campuhan ridge path above the river.

The walk took forty minutes and covered the kind of ground that makes you understand why people come to Ubud and stay for months. The path follows the ridge between two river valleys — on one side the Campuhan River, on the other the Wos — and runs through bamboo groves and small warungs selling cold drinks before opening into the hillside above town. I arrived at the main market faintly sweaty and extremely glad I had come.

The Monkey Forest, and an Evening on Monkey Forest Road

I had been to the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary before, years earlier, and remembered it as crowded. It was still crowded. But I had timed the visit for mid-afternoon when the tour groups thin out, and the forest itself — the dense canopy, the moss-covered stone carvings, the macaques doing whatever they pleased with the absolute certainty of creatures who know they hold territorial advantage — remained one of the more unusual places I have spent an hour anywhere in Bali.

The thing nobody warns you about is how quickly the monkeys make decisions. I had my phone in my hand, which was fine, and then a juvenile macaque about the size of a cat appeared on the path rail at eye level and looked at my phone with an expression I can only describe as evaluative. I put the phone away. The macaque moved on. We understood each other.

Entrance for adults is IDR 90,000 for local visitor and IDR 130,000 for international visitor. A sarong is provided free at the gate. Allow 90 minutes if you want to find the Dragon Bridge and the quieter temple areas toward the back — most people rush the main path and miss the best parts.

That evening I walked Monkey Forest Road from the forest back north toward the palace. The street is touristy in the way that Ubud is generally touristy — which is to say it is densely commercial and also genuinely beautiful, with art galleries and craft shops and cafés mixed into a landscape of trees, traditional architecture, and the occasional offering basket placed at a doorstep. I ate nasi campur at a warung that had four plastic tables and no menu and cost IDR 25,000. It was excellent.

Working Remotely from Ubud — and Why the Backup Connection Mattered

I had calls in the morning and a deadline in the afternoon, which meant Day 2 needed to work as a proper work day despite being in one of the more distracting places I have ever tried to concentrate. I had heard about Hubud — Ubud's original coworking space — and decided to try it before the deadline pressure made the decision for me.

Hubud sits on the top floor of a building on Jalan Monkey Forest, open on all sides, with rice paddy views on one end and the town below on the other. The Wi-Fi is fiber, fast, and shared among people who are all trying to get things done — which creates a specific kind of productive atmosphere that open-plan offices with fluorescent lighting have never managed to replicate. I did my calls, met my deadline, and ate lunch at the ground floor café without moving more than thirty meters in four hours.

The moment that justified having a Telkomsel backup: midway through my second call, the fiber connection dropped. Not for long — maybe four minutes — but four minutes into a client call is four minutes of silence and the particular social awkwardness of a screen that has frozen mid-sentence. My phone had been sitting next to my laptop. I switched the hotspot on, the laptop jumped to BaliSIM's Telkomsel connection, and the call resumed before anyone on the other end had fully registered the gap.

Four minutes. But those are the four minutes you remember.

In the afternoon I rented a bicycle from the guesthouse (IDR 50,000 for the day) and rode east toward Petulu village, where thousands of white herons roost at dusk. The ride takes about twenty minutes on quiet village roads, past compound walls draped in bougainvillea and small temples with fresh flower offerings at the gate. The herons begin arriving around 5:30 PM, filling the trees along the village entrance road until the branches look like they have leafed out in white overnight. It is free, almost nobody knows about it, and it is one of the best things I did in Ubud.

Tegallalang at Dawn and an Afternoon at Outpost

I hired a driver for Day 3 — IDR 400,000 for the day, arranged through the guesthouse, confirmed the night before via WhatsApp. We left at 6:00 AM, which felt aggressive until we arrived at Tegallalang Rice Terraces at 6:45 AM and had the viewpoint entirely to ourselves for forty minutes before the first tour van appeared on the road above.

Tegallalang in the morning, before the crowds, is one of those sights that earns every cliché written about it. The terraces descend in steps from the road down to the river valley — each level of rice at a different stage of growth, the green running from pale yellow at the newest shoots to deep emerald at the mature plants, with the sound of the irrigation channels and roosters from the village above and nothing much else. My driver had brought coffee in a flask. We stood at the viewpoint and drank it and did not feel the need to say anything.

By 8:30 AM the first selfie sticks had appeared. We left.

The driver took me north to Kintamani after Tegallalang — the highland caldera overlooking Lake Batur and Mount Batur, about 45 minutes further up into the hills. The road climbs through coffee and clove plantations, past villages where the air is noticeably cooler than Ubud, and arrives at the caldera rim with a view that feels genuinely disproportionate to the distance traveled. I had expected something nice. I got something vertiginous.

One note on Kintamani: Telkomsel held signal at the caldera viewpoints and the main village. On the descent back toward Ubud, there were two stretches of maybe five minutes each where the signal dropped entirely. Not a problem unless you need it — I was looking out the window — but worth knowing if you are trying to navigate or take a call on the road down.

Back in Ubud by early afternoon, I spent two hours at Outpost — Hubud's main competitor, and different in character. Outpost is more air-conditioned, more enclosed, more suited to calls that need quiet. I finished the day's work there, then walked five minutes to Locavore To Go on Jalan Dewi Sita for dinner — the takeaway counter of Ubud's most acclaimed restaurant, serving the same quality of Balinese produce at street food prices. I ate on a bench outside and thought about whether I needed to extend by another night.

Leaving Ubud Later Than Planned

I extended by one morning. Not a full day — just enough to walk the Campuhan Ridge Walk properly in the other direction, buy a painting from a gallery on Jalan Raya Ubud that I had walked past twice, and eat one more breakfast on the terrace before my Gojek south arrived.

The painting is a batik of rice paddies in four shades of green. It is currently rolled in a tube in my bag. I am not entirely sure where I will hang it but that feels like a future problem.

The Gojek driver was twenty-three, had never been to Sanur, and asked me whether the beach there was better than Kuta. I told him the water was calmer. He nodded as if confirming a theory. We drove south through the rice fields toward the coast and I watched Ubud disappear in the wing mirror.

What Made the Trip Work — and What I Would Do Differently

Three nights in Ubud as a remote worker is enough to get the shape of the place without exhausting it. The rhythm — early morning for walks or day trips, mid-morning for work at a coworking space, afternoon for shorter excursions or continued work, evening for food and wandering — works well and does not require aggressive scheduling.

The things I would tell someone planning the same trip: stay west of the center if you can, in Penestanan or Sayan, where the accommodation is cheaper and the walks are better. Hire a driver for at least one full day and go to Tegallalang at 6:00 AM rather than 9:00 AM. Eat at Locavore To Go for dinner if Locavore itself is out of budget. Do not skip Petulu at dusk.

The connectivity piece: Ubud's coworking spaces are genuinely excellent, but the town's geography — hills, river valleys, dense jungle in places — means mobile signal is less consistent here than in southern Bali. In the center it is fine. On the roads to Kintamani, in Campuhan, on the ridge walk, it is variable. The network that handles this variability best is Telkomsel, which is why the best eSIM for Ubud is specifically one that runs on Telkomsel rather than a cheaper provider routing through weaker infrastructure.

I used BaliSIM throughout — installed on my phone before I flew, active from the airport, running in the background while Hubud's fiber handled the heavy lifting and taking over quietly the two times it needed to. That is the setup I would use again: coworking Wi-Fi as primary, Balisim eSIM as backup that you stop thinking about because it never fails.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ubud rewards people who arrive without a tight itinerary and punishes people who arrive with one. The best version of three nights here is one where the morning plan is loose enough to follow a path you did not know existed when you woke up, and the connectivity is solid enough that none of the logistics — the driver, the booking, the navigation back to a guesthouse down an unmarked lane — ever becomes the thing you are thinking about.

That is the part the eSIM handles. Everything else, Ubud figures out for you.