Campuhan Ridge Walk: Where It Starts, and Why Sunrise Wins

West of central Ubud the ground splits into two river gorges, and a narrow spine of land runs out between them. Someone laid a strip of stone paving along the top of it, and that is the Campuhan Ridge Walk: roughly two kilometres of open crest with a wooded valley falling away on each side, tall grass on the verges, and the roofs of Ubud disappearing behind you within five minutes.

It costs nothing. There is no gate, no ticket office and no donation post, which around Ubud is close to a miracle. It is also easy: paved the whole way, a gradual climb, and walkable in whatever you have on your feet.

Almost everything that goes wrong with it comes down to two things. People cannot find the entrance, and they arrive at ten in the morning on a path that has no shade whatsoever. Both are solvable before you leave your room.

Rice paddies with a stone shrine at Bangkiang Sidem, beyond the far end of the Campuhan ridge

From≈ $22/ pers.

The ridge is free. This is the other walk.

Free cancellation

Guided village and rice field walks, Ubud

Duration: 3 to 4 hFrom ≈ $22 / pers.

✓Do not book anything for the ridge itself: it is a free public footpath with no ticket of any kind
✓What a guide adds is the part beyond it, the villages and paddies around Bangkiang Sidem and Keliki
✓Small group walks explain the subak irrigation system, which is the reason the landscape looks the way it does
✓Most start at dawn for the same reason this page does, and end with breakfast
✓Free cancellation on most listings if the forecast turns

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On this page

A ridge, not a rice field

This is the misconception that produces most of the disappointment, and it is worth clearing up before anything practical.

Search for Ubud and the images that come back are terraced paddies stepping down a hillside with water lying between the rows. People arrive at Campuhan expecting a version of that with a footpath through it, and what they find instead is a grass ridge: a narrow spine of open ground with a wooded gorge dropping away on the left and another on the right, and elephant grass shoulder high on the verges.

It is a genuinely good landscape, and it is not the one in the photographs people came with. The confusion is made worse by the number of articles that illustrate this walk with pictures of flooded terraces taken somewhere else entirely. There are no rice fields on the crest. Not one.

The grass crest of the Campuhan ridge with a lone palm, wooded valleys falling away on both sides — Tall grass, a single palm, and the ground dropping away on both sides. This is what the walk actually looks like, and there is not a paddy in the frame.

What there is instead is space, and a lot of sky. From the middle of the ridge you can see the whole shape of the valley system that Ubud sits inside, which is something you cannot see from anywhere in town. On a clear morning the mist sits in the two gorges and the crest stands above it.

If terraced paddies are specifically what you want, the honest answer is to go to Tegallalang twenty minutes north instead, and treat Campuhan as the free morning walk that it is. Doing both, on different mornings, is the version that leaves nobody disappointed.

Finding the start, and everything after it

Where does the Campuhan Ridge Walk start is the most searched question about this walk by a wide margin, and there is a reason for that: the turn looks like a private driveway and nothing is signed.

Marker	Distance from the palace	Time	What is there
Ubud Palace	0.0 km	Start	The walk down begins here.
The Campuhan bridge	1.2 km	12 to 15 min	Old arched bridge over the confluence.
The lane down to the temple	1.3 km	15 min	Unsigned turn beside the Ibah hotel.
Pura Gunung Lebah	1.4 km	17 min	The temple, and the real trailhead.
Onto the ridge	1.6 km	20 min	Steps, then the crest opens on both sides.
The crest itself	1.6 to 3.2 km	20 to 50 min	The open, gently rising paved section.
Bangkiang Sidem	3.4 km	50 to 60 min	Where the ridge stops and the village starts.

The paved footpath at the start of the Campuhan Ridge Walk passing beside the temple of Pura Gunung Lebah in Ubud — The first two minutes, alongside the temple. The path is unmistakable once you are on it. Getting to this point is the part that defeats people.

Three things that make it findable

Navigate to the temple, Pura Gunung Lebah, not to the walk. Map pins for the trail are scattered along its whole length and several of them are on the wrong side of the gorge.
Use the Ibah hotel as your landmark. The lane down to the temple is the one that passes its entrance, just before the bridge coming from town.
If you have crossed the bridge and started climbing again, you have gone too far by about a hundred metres. Turn round.

Trailhead on Maps

There is a second entrance at the far end, in Bangkiang Sidem, which is worth knowing if you are being dropped off. Starting from that end means walking the ridge downhill and finishing in the middle of Ubud, which on a hot day is the better direction.

Parking, which is the real friction

Every other practical detail about this walk is easy. This one is not, and most guides skip it entirely.

On foot: the answer for almost everyone

Twelve to fifteen minutes downhill from the palace along Jalan Raya Ubud. No vehicle, no parking question, and you get a shaded road rather than an open ridge for that stretch.

By scooter: workable, informally

Bikes are usually left near the bottom of the lane or by the temple, watched by whoever is there, for a token fee. It is unofficial rather than organised, and space runs out on a busy morning.

By car: no car park exists

The lane is narrow, it serves a hotel, and there is nowhere to leave a vehicle at the bottom of it. With a driver, be dropped at the temple and picked up at the far end.

The reason this matters more than it should is that Campuhan sits at the pinch point of Ubud traffic. Jalan Raya Ubud narrows towards the bridge, there is no verge, and a car stopped for thirty seconds backs up the whole street. Anyone who has watched the morning jam at that bridge will understand why nobody has built a car park there.

If you are staying anywhere in central Ubud, Penestanan or Sanggingan, walk. If you are coming from the south of the island for the day, park in town, do the ridge in the morning, and spend the rest of the day on something that has a car park, such as the palace and the market in the middle of town.

Distance, timing and how hard it actually is

Published figures for this walk range from one kilometre to nine, because everybody measures a different thing. Here is each leg separately, so you can add up the version you intend to do.

Which leg	Distance	Time	What it involves
Ubud Palace to the trailhead	1.2 km	12 to 15 min	Downhill on the road, with pavement most of the way and shade for part of it.
Temple to the end of the ridge	1.8 to 2 km	30 to 40 min	The paved crest itself. Gradual climb, no shade, one short set of steps at the start.
Out and back on the ridge only	≈ 4 km	1 h to 1 h 30	What most people actually do, including a stop at a warung near the far end.
Palace to village and back on foot	≈ 6.5 km	2 h to 2 h 30	The full version without a ride home. Add the climb back up into town at the end.
Ridge out, road and ride back	≈ 3.5 km walked	1 h 15	The loop most worth doing in the heat. Walk the crest once, come down by road or by car.

Is it difficult? Not in the way people mean

The terrain is trivial. It is paved from end to end, wide enough for two people, with one short flight of steps just after the temple and then a gradual, cumulative climb of under a hundred metres spread across the whole two kilometres. Nobody notices that climb on the way out. Everybody notices it on the way back.

Two walkers on the paved Campuhan ridge path with the wooded valley and a lone palm beside them — The paving is a strip of stone blocks with grass either side. Easy underfoot, and completely open overhead.

What makes it feel hard is heat and exposure rather than gradient. A gentle uphill on an open ridge at thirty degrees with the sun overhead is a different exercise from the same slope at six in the morning, and the difference is not marginal. This is the whole reason the next section exists.

Practically: fine for children who can walk four kilometres, fine in trainers or sandals, not realistic in a wheelchair or with a pushchair because of the steps and the uneven paving in places. Runners use it early and it is a good surface for that.

The hour you set off decides the whole thing

The ridge does not change through the day. The sun does, and there is nothing on this path to stand under.

There is no shade on this ridge worth the name. Everything below follows from that one fact, including how the walk back feels.

Slot	Sun on the ridge	How busy	The walk back
Before first light (05:15 to 06:00)	None yet, cool and often under mist	Almost nobody, a few runners	Back down before the sun has any strength
Sunrise (06:00 to 07:30)	Low and soft, warmth arriving by the end of it	Thin, mostly people who came for this	Warm on the climb back but nothing worse
Mid morning (08:00 to 10:00)	Climbing fast, and there is nothing to stand under	Building, and the first tour groups appear	This is where people start regretting the second kilometre
Middle of the day (10:00 to 15:00)	Full sun on an exposed ridge, no shade anywhere	Thinning out, because the heat has done the filtering	Genuinely unpleasant, and the reason for the bad reviews
Late afternoon (16:00 to 18:30)	Dropping, and the last hour is soft again	Second busiest window after mid morning	Comfortable, as long as you do not lose the light

Before first light

Leave by: Leave central Ubud around 05:00, allow fifteen minutes on foot to the temple.

The best version of this walk and the one almost nobody does. The valleys on either side hold mist, the grass is wet, and the light comes up while you are already on the crest. You need a torch for the first ten minutes because the lane down to the temple is unlit, and that is the whole price.

Sunrise

Leave by: Leave central Ubud by 05:45 if you want to be on the ridge for the light.

The default right answer. Bali sits close to the equator, so sunrise lands between about six and half past six all year and does not swing with the seasons the way it does at home. Walk out for an hour, take a coffee at the far end, and be back in town before the heat means anything.

Mid morning

Leave by: Any time, which is why this is the busiest window.

Still perfectly doable, and the window most visitors actually use. The walk out is fine. The walk back is the problem: it climbs gently the whole way and the sun is now directly on you with no cover at all. Carry more water than a two kilometre path suggests you need.

Middle of the day

Leave by: Not recommended without a hat and a litre of water each.

The hours that generate the disappointed reviews. Nothing about the ridge is dangerous, but a flat exposed path at thirty degrees with a gentle climb on the way back is hard work, and people who expected a gentle stroll through greenery end up walking it in silence. If this is your only window, turn round at the first cafe rather than pushing to the village.

Late afternoon

Leave by: Be at the temple by 16:30 if you intend to walk the full length.

The credible alternative to sunrise, and the one to pick if a morning alarm is not happening. The catch is the dark: sunset falls between roughly six and half past, tropical dusk is short, and the ridge has no lighting whatsoever. Set a turnaround time and stick to it.

What no shade actually means here

Along the entire crest there is one much photographed palm, a few low bushes and nothing else above head height. The grass on the verges is tall enough to hide the valley but far too low to shade a path. Between the temple and the village you will pass through perhaps thirty seconds of shadow in total, and that is generous.

The narrow paved Campuhan path rising between walls of tall grass under an open sky with no shade — Tall grass on both sides and open sky above. Nothing in this frame casts a shadow you could stand in.

Bali sits eight degrees south of the equator, which means the sun comes up fast and gets high quickly. By nine in the morning it is already steep in the sky, and the paving reflects heat back up at you. The people who describe this walk as gruelling are not unfit. They simply did it at the wrong time.

The corollary is the good news. Walked at first light this is a cool, quiet, genuinely lovely hour, and it is free, which makes it the single best value morning in Ubud. Bring water anyway, because the warungs on the crest often do not open until the first proper wave of walkers arrives.

The temple and the confluence at the bottom

Most people walk straight past the oldest thing on this route without registering what it is.

Campuhan is a Balinese word for the place where two rivers merge, and that is what lies in the gorge under the bridge: the Wos Barat and the Wos Timur, the west and east branches, joining on a tongue of land. In Balinese Hinduism a confluence is a charged place rather than a piece of hydrology, which is why there is a sanctuary on exactly that spot.

The rocky river gorge at Campuhan below the bridge, where the two Wos rivers meet near Ubud — The gorge under the bridge, where the two branches of the Wos meet. The temple stands on the tongue of land between them, and the ridge starts just above it.

Pura Gunung Lebah sits down there, walled, shaded and cool, and tradition attributes its founding to the sage Rsi Markandeya, who is credited with bringing Hinduism into this part of the island. That places it among the older sanctuaries of the Ubud valley, considerably older than the town that grew up above it.

You walk past it rather than through it, and there is no fee for either. If you do go inside, the standard rules apply: a sarong, a sash, shoulders covered, and stay out of any area where a ceremony is under way. During a temple anniversary the whole gorge fills with people in white and the ridge above is deserted, which is an unusually good time to be up there.

The bridge above is worth two minutes of its own. The old arched span next to the modern road bridge dates from the colonial period and is closed to traffic, which makes it the one place you can stand still and look down into the confluence without a scooter passing your elbow.

The far end, and how far to push

The ridge does not end at a viewpoint or a sign. It simply stops being a ridge, and you find yourself on a village road.

Walkers passing a thatched cafe and spa beside flooded rice paddies at Bangkiang Sidem, at the end of the Campuhan ridge — Bangkiang Sidem, where the paving becomes a road. The cafes and the paddies are here, at the end of the walk rather than along it.

After about two kilometres the crest broadens, houses appear on both sides, and you are in Bangkiang Sidem. There are cafes and warungs with terraces facing back down the valley, and one long established spa and cafe complex that most guides treat as the official finish line.

This is also, finally, where the rice appears. The flat ground behind the village is worked paddy, and if you came for that image it is here rather than on the ridge. Ten minutes of walking past the first cafe puts you between fields with the ridge behind you and almost nobody around.

How far to push depends entirely on the hour. At sunrise, keep going: another kilometre up the road reaches quieter warungs with better views and empty terraces. At ten in the morning, stop at the first place with a roof, drink something cold, and think seriously about not walking back.

Beyond the village the lanes continue north towards Keliki and Payogan through country that sees very few visitors. That is proper walking rather than a stroll, and it is the part a local guide is genuinely useful for, since none of it is waymarked.

Flooded rice terraces with a stone shrine at Bangkiang Sidem, beyond the end of the Campuhan ridge — The paddies people expect on the ridge are actually past the end of it, on the flat ground around Bangkiang Sidem. Walking ten minutes further than everyone else is what gets you here.

What it costs, which is nothing

Worth stating plainly, because several sites sell tickets and tours for a path that has no ticket.

What you might pay for	Detail	Order of magnitude
Access to the ridge	No gate, no ticket booth, no donation post at either end. This is genuinely unusual around Ubud.	Free
Water and a coconut	Two small warungs on the crest and several cafes in the village at the far end.	≈ $1 to $2
Coffee with the valley view	The terraces at Bangkiang Sidem charge Ubud cafe prices rather than warung prices.	≈ $3 to $6
Ride back into town	Ordered from the village on a ride hailing app. Scooter is cheaper than a car.	≈ $1 to $3
Scooter parking near the trailhead	Informal, collected by whoever is watching the bikes. Cars have no equivalent option.	≈ $0.60

Everything in that table except the first line is optional, and every figure moves. Treat them as orders of magnitude rather than prices. The important row is the top one: the ridge is a free public footpath, open at every hour, with nobody collecting anything at either end.

If a site is selling you a ticket for the Campuhan Ridge Walk, what you are buying is transport, a guide, or a package that happens to include it. That can be perfectly good value, particularly if it takes you into the villages beyond the ridge. It is not access, because access was never restricted.

What to bring, and what is up there

Water

More than four kilometres suggests. A litre between two people is a sensible floor in the morning and not enough at midday. The warungs on the crest keep unpredictable hours.

Sun

Hat and sunscreen, both, and reapplied if you are out after nine. There is no cover on the ridge and the paving reflects heat back up at you.

Cash

Small notes for warungs and for whoever is watching the scooters. The cafes at the far end usually take cards, the stalls on the ridge do not.

Feet

Trainers or walking sandals. No hiking boots required, and flip flops are survivable but unpleasant on the uneven sections of paving.

Facilities, honestly

There are no toilets on the ridge. The temple at the start has them, the cafes at the far end have them, and between those two points there is nothing for two kilometres, with no cover either side of the path. At sunrise, when the warungs are shut, plan for that before you leave.

Bins are scarce, so carry your rubbish to the village. There are no lights, no benches worth the name, and no shelter from rain. What there is, in return, is a maintained paved path through genuinely open country ten minutes from a main street.

Dogs, monkeys and other worries

Village dogs live along the ridge and around the far end. They are territorial about their own gate and indifferent about everything else. Walk past at a steady pace, do not offer food, and nothing happens. This is a normal feature of walking anywhere rural in Bali rather than a Campuhan problem.

There are no monkeys on the ridge. The macaques people worry about are two kilometres away in the forest sanctuary on the other side of town, and they do not commute.

Photographing a ridge that everyone has already photographed

The frames that work here are the ones that show the shape of the land. The frames that do not are the ones taken at eye level in flat midday light, which is most of them.

What actually works

Shoot along the path rather than across it. The curve of the paving disappearing over the next rise is the picture. The grass either side is not.
Get low. Crouching drops the horizon and turns a footpath into a ridge, which is the thing you actually came to look at.
Use the lone palm on the crest as your anchor. It is the one vertical on an otherwise horizontal landscape and it gives the frame a scale.
Come back with mist. In the wet season the two gorges fill and the ridge appears to float, which is the version of this place almost nobody sees.

Drones, and the rules that apply

Most of the famous aerial shots of this ridge are drone frames, and the reason is obvious: from above, the paving reads as a ribbon along a green spine and the whole geography becomes legible in one image. From the ground you can never quite show it.

Flying here is common but not consent free. Keep well away from the temple at the confluence, and do not fly at all over a ceremony, which is both a courtesy and increasingly a matter of local enforcement. Early is better for that too, since a drone at seven in the morning bothers nobody and the same drone at nine is buzzing fifty walkers.

If you do not have one, do not stress about it. The ground level photograph that works is the one taken in the first hour of light with the path curving away, and it beats a midday aerial every time.

Which months, and what the rain does

April to October: dry season

Reliable mornings, low chance of being rained on, and the busiest months on the crest. The grass is drier and more straw coloured by the end of it, and the heat once the sun is up is at its most serious. Sunrise matters most in these months.

November to March: wet season

The ridge is at its greenest, the mornings are often clear, and the rain tends to arrive in the afternoon in short heavy bursts. Far fewer people. The path is paved so it does not turn to mud, but it does get slick in places.

The seasonal difference on this particular walk is smaller than the difference between six in the morning and ten in the morning. That is unusual, and it is worth internalising: the hour matters more than the month. A wet season sunrise on a green ridge with mist in the gorges beats a dry season midday every time.

One genuine wet season risk is being caught out. There is no shelter anywhere on the crest, and a Balinese downpour is not a drizzle. If the sky is building while you are at the far end, that is the moment to order a ride from the village rather than to start walking back.

Where it fits in an Ubud morning

This is a ninety minute activity, not a day, and it slots naturally into the front of one.

06:00 to 07:30: the ridge

Out along the crest in the cool, coffee at the far end, and a ride or a walk back down. You are finished before most visitors have had breakfast.

08:00 to 10:00: breakfast and the town

Back into central Ubud for food, then the market and the palace, both of which are five minutes apart and still quiet at that hour.

From 10:00: something with shade

The heat of the day is for terraces, temples or water. The waterfall at Tegenungan is half an hour away and works precisely when the ridge does not.

The pairing that does not work is Campuhan and Tegallalang on the same morning. Both are best at first light, they are twenty minutes apart by road, and doing them back to back means one of them gets the heat and the crowds. Give them separate mornings, or accept that the second one will be the lesser experience.

Staying close helps more than anything else on this page. Anywhere in central Ubud, Penestanan or along Sanggingan puts you within a twenty minute walk of the trailhead, which is what makes a six in the morning start realistic rather than theoretical. The guide to Ubud goes through which of those areas suits which kind of stay.

Campuhan Ridge Walk: common questions

How long is the Campuhan Ridge Walk?

The ridge itself runs about two kilometres from the temple to the village of Bangkiang Sidem, so four kilometres and roughly an hour and a half if you walk it out and back. Starting from the middle of Ubud adds a kilometre and a quarter in each direction. Plenty of people turn round at the first warung on the crest, which brings the whole thing closer to an hour.

Is the Campuhan Ridge Walk difficult?

No. It is a paved path along the top of a ridge with a gradual climb of under a hundred metres spread over two kilometres, and ordinary shoes are fine. The difficulty is heat rather than terrain: there is essentially no shade anywhere on the crest, and the return leg climbs gently the whole way. Walked at sunrise it is easy for almost anyone. Walked at noon it is hard work regardless of fitness.

Where is the start of the Campuhan Ridge Walk?

Beside Pura Gunung Lebah, the temple in the bottom of the gorge where the Wos Barat and Wos Timur rivers meet, just west of central Ubud. Walking down Jalan Raya Ubud from the palace, a small lane turns off downhill past the entrance to the Ibah hotel just before the Campuhan bridge. That lane leads to the temple, and the footpath leaves from beside it. It looks like a hotel driveway, which is why this is the most asked question about the walk.

Is there a Campuhan Ridge Walk trail in Ubud?

Yes, and it is a real, permanently maintained public footpath rather than a route across private land. Locally the ridge is called Bukit Campuhan. The paving is a strip of stone blocks laid along the crest, it runs continuously from the temple to the village, and there is no route finding involved once you are on it.

Is the Campuhan Ridge Walk free?

It is completely free. There is no ticket office, no gate and no donation post at either end, which makes it one of the very few things around Ubud that costs nothing at all. You will spend money only if you want to: water from a warung, coffee at the far end, or a ride back into town instead of walking.

What time should you do the Campuhan Ridge Walk?

Sunrise, which in Bali means between about six and half past six all year round. The ridge is entirely exposed, so the walk is cool and quiet at first light and becomes genuinely unpleasant from mid morning onwards. Late afternoon is the credible alternative, with the caveat that tropical dusk is short and the path has no lighting at all.

Where do you park for the Campuhan Ridge Walk?

This is the real friction of the visit. There is no car park at the trailhead: the lane down to the temple is narrow, serves a hotel, and has nowhere to leave a vehicle. Scooters can usually be left informally near the bottom of the lane for a small fee. With a car, the sane options are to park in central Ubud and walk down, or to be dropped off and arrange a pickup at the far end.

Is the Campuhan Ridge Walk a rice terrace walk?

No, and this is the single most common disappointment. The crest is a grass ridge between two wooded river gorges, with tall elephant grass on the verges rather than paddies. Rice fields do appear, but at the far end around Bangkiang Sidem and beyond it, once the ridge has finished. If terraces are what you came for, Tegallalang twenty minutes north is the page you want instead.

Can you do the walk as a loop?

Partly. There is no second ridge to come back along, but from Bangkiang Sidem a road drops in about three kilometres to Jalan Raya Sanggingan on the west side of Ubud, which turns the outing into a loop on tarmac. The more common version is to walk the crest one way in the cool and order a scooter or a car from the village for the ride down.

What should you bring on the Campuhan Ridge Walk?

Water first, more than two kilometres suggests you need, then a hat and sunscreen. Ordinary trainers or sandals are fine on the paving. A small amount of cash for the warungs, since the ones on the ridge do not take cards, and a torch if you are setting out before first light because the lane down to the temple is unlit.

Are there toilets on the Campuhan Ridge Walk?

Not on the crest itself. The temple at the start has facilities and so do the cafes at the far end, but between them there is nothing for two kilometres and nowhere out of sight of the path either. Plan accordingly, especially at sunrise when the warungs on the ridge may not be open yet.

Can you do the walk in the rain?

The path is paved so it does not turn to mud, but the ridge is completely exposed and there is nowhere to shelter along most of it. In the wet season, from roughly November to March, showers arrive fast in the afternoon and pass quickly. Walking early avoids nearly all of it, and the grass is at its greenest in those months.