Before I get to our hotel and activity reviews, I wanted to explain how we got around in Bali. Some tourists stay in one place and just walk or hire a scooter for local sightseeing. If you want to move further afield, it makes sense to hire a driver as it’s not expensive and it gets you some much needed air-conditioning between baking hot rice fields, waterfalls and monkey forests.

Bali has a ton of traffic. As more and more tourists visit the island, the traffic jams, particularly in the most popular areas like Kuta, Nusa Dua and Ubud, are terrible. Most of the locals get around on scooters or motorcycles, but that doesn’t always help as they are constantly darting in and out of the vehicle traffic.

Bali also has very little public transportation. There are apparently a few buses, but I never saw any in the 10 days or so we were there. Interestingly, there’s actually plans for a subway/metro that will be built in the next few years, but let’s see if that comes to pass.

So, what was our solution? I decided that we would stay in three different places and use the transfer days for some sightseeing. This way, we would see quite a lot of Bali, but not be stuck in traffic going back and forth to our hotel. I did also book two tours for myself (snorkeling and sunrise volcano hike) but those both were taken from the closest possible location – Sanur for snorkeling and Ubud for the volcano. Both tours provided transportation to the tour starting point although one was an extra cost on top of the tour price.

I received a few different recommendations for Bali drivers and reached out to several of them. I ended up booking the one that was the most responsive to my WhatsApp messages. I put together an itinerary for our transfer days plus added a trip to and from the airport.

In the end, the driver messaged that he was sick the day we arrived, but he had his father pick us up (who also works as a driver). There was no issue with the substitution and they handled the communication very well. However, on another day he was supposed to take us from Ubud to Uluwatu, he reached out to say he was already in Uluwatu thanks to a late night job the previous day and wouldn’t be able to make it back to pick us up. He again had his father drive us and again it was no big deal, although I found it a bit irresponsible as he had already been hired by us for the following day.

The one issue we ended up having, and why I won’t recommend him, is that on our transfer from Sanur to Ubud, I had asked to stop at the Celuk Village silver shops so my wife could look at the handmade jewelry that the area is famous for. Unfortunately, he first stopped at a large shop with an obviously fake workshop where my wife (who knows how to make jewelry) noticed they didn’t even have the proper tools. When we asked why he stopped there, he said that his friend worked there. Well, that’s not a reason to stop there if we’re looking for an authentic shop. My wife Googled the local shops and ended up finding us a great local shop that was basically inside someone’s house.

He was a young guy so I won’t identify him or give him a bad review. Hopefully, he’ll learn to adapt to the needs of his passengers. Also, I did appreciate the fact that he had his dad substitute without causing us any hassle to find a replacement. We also ended up hiring him for another day in Ubud when we wanted to reach the Sangeh Monkey Forest and he basically matched the price I was quoted in the Grab app.

When we needed to get around near the locations we were staying, we used the Grab app. There’s another ridesharing app called Gojek, but we were familiar with Grab from Vietnam and Cambodia so we used that for all of our local rides. We ended up also just using Grab to get from the Alila Uluwatu to the Holiday Inn Express near the airport on the last day as it was just a point-to-point trip that made more sense for ridesharing than a hired driver. The Holiday Inn Express then had a shuttle to get us those last couple of kilometers to the airport.

If you’re planning a trip to Bali, you should probably hire a driver, either through your hotel or directly (which will be cheaper). While the traffic can be bad, our plan to take one way journeys between hotels, stopping along the way, seemed to keep us out of the worst of the gridlock.

Up Next: Andaz Bali Review

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