5 Days in Ubud: A Literary Guide Through Temples, Bookshops and the Town That Rebuilt Itself With Words

Ubud has a goddess for this. Saraswati, patron of knowledge, art and the written word, has her own water temple here, right in the centre of town, and it isn’t a coincidence that a place this devoted to art ended up with a literary festival, a scatter of good bookshops and a century-long habit of pulling in writers, painters and composers who arrived meaning to stay a week and never quite left. This itinerary follows that thread outward from the temple, stopping long enough to notice what got written here, and why.

Day 1: Central Ubud

Start where the town starts: the palace, the market, and the temple dedicated to the goddess behind all of it.

Morning: Ubud Palace and the market. Puri Saren Agung, the royal palace, sits at the town’s main crossroads and remains home to Ubud’s royal family, though parts are open to visitors most mornings. Across the road, the Ubud Art Market is loud and commercial in the way markets are meant to be. Neither is quiet, exactly, but both are useful for understanding the scale of what Ubud has always produced and sold.

Midday: Pura Taman Saraswati. A short walk from the palace, this water temple honours Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, wisdom and the arts, and it’s one of the loveliest small spaces in town: a bridge crossing a pond thick with pink lotus flowers, carved stone gateways on either side. It was designed in the early 1950s by the Balinese sculptor I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, commissioned by Ubud’s royal family. Entry is free, and mornings are quietest.

Afternoon: Ganesha Bookshop. On the corner of Jalan Raya and Jalan Jembawan, this small independent shop has been trading since 1986, specialising in new, used and out-of-print books on Bali and Indonesia. The shelves lean toward history, politics, anthropology and spirituality, with a smaller fiction section near the front, much of it left behind by travellers. A “Books for Bali” program channels donated titles to local schools and libraries, and the shop will buy back a book at half price if you finish it before you fly home.

Evening: Museum Puri Lukisan. Bali’s oldest art museum sits just off the main street, its four galleries arranged around gardens and a lotus pond. It traces the story of modern Balinese painting from the 1930s onward, including the foreign artists who helped shape it and the Balinese painters, Lempad among them, who shaped it in return.

Day 2: Campuhan

Cross the river and follow the road that gave twentieth-century Balinese art its centre of gravity.

Morning: Hotel Tjampuhan and the Walter Spies House. Opened in 1928 as a royal guesthouse, this is Bali’s second-oldest hotel. It once housed the German painter Walter Spies, widely credited with shaping both Bali’s modern art movement and its international reputation. His two-storey studio, preserved within the hotel grounds, can still be visited or booked as a room. In 1936, working with the Ubud royal family and the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet, Spies helped found Pita Maha, an artists’ collective that reshaped Balinese painting for a generation.

Midday: Little Talks, on the ground floor of Ani’s Villas. A small, quiet café with a library wall and a view down toward Pura Gunung Lebah and the Campuhan River. The book selection is modest but well chosen, heavy on travel writing, and the setting alone earns a slow coffee here.

Afternoon: the Campuhan Ridge Walk. A well-marked path along a grassy ridge above two river valleys, roughly forty-five minutes at an unhurried pace, with views over Ubud that make clear why painters kept turning up.

Evening: Pura Gunung Lebah. At the foot of the ridge, this small riverside temple marks the confluence that gives the Campuhan area its name (the word means, roughly, “meeting of two rivers”). It’s easy to walk past and worth pausing for.

Day 3: Casa Luna & the Festival That Rebuilt a Town

This is the day for the story behind Ubud’s literary reputation, and the woman who built a large part of it.

Morning: Casa Luna. Opened in 1992 by Janet DeNeefe, an Australian who moved to Bali in 1984 and never left, Casa Luna has spent more than three decades serving Balinese food across long, unhurried breakfasts and slower lunches. DeNeefe is also the author of several books on Balinese food and culture, and, more relevantly here, the founder of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival.

Midday: the story of the Festival. In 2004, in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings, DeNeefe and her husband Ketut Suardana launched the festival as a small act of recovery for a town whose economy and spirit had been badly shaken. It has since grown into one of the region’s most respected literary events, held each October and drawing writers from around the world. If your visit doesn’t align with the festival dates, the town still carries its imprint: readings, workshops and book launches happen at Casa Luna and elsewhere throughout the year.

Afternoon: Indus Restaurant. Another DeNeefe project, a short walk from Casa Luna, worth a slow lunch, with the same rice-field view that has apparently kept a lot of writers lingering longer than planned.

Evening: Honeymoon Guesthouse, Jalan Bisma. Also owned by DeNeefe and Suardana, this isn’t a place you need to stay to appreciate. Its garden restaurant and pool are open to visitors, and the whole compound carries the same unhurried, book-adjacent atmosphere as Casa Luna just down the road.

Day 4: Rice Terraces, Monkey Forest & the Sacred Everyday

A day out of the town centre, into the landscape that shaped everything written about this place.

Morning: Tegallalang rice terraces. A twenty-minute drive north of Ubud, these tiered paddies are Bali’s most photographed agricultural landscape, farmed using the centuries-old subak irrigation system, a cooperative water-sharing method recognised by UNESCO. Arrive early, before the tour buses.

Midday: Goa Gajah, the Elephant Cave. A short drive east, this archaeological site dates to roughly the 9th to 11th centuries, its entrance carved into a demon face worn smooth by time and touch. The bathing pools and ruined courtyard beyond are quieter than the entrance suggests.

Afternoon: the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary. Officially the Mandala Wisata Wenara Wana, this forest at the southern end of Monkey Forest Road houses several temples among the trees, most notably Pura Dalem Agung Padangtegal. The monkeys are the draw for most visitors, but the temple grounds themselves, when the crowds thin, reward the extra time.

Evening: Threads of Life. A textile gallery and social enterprise working with traditional Indonesian weavers, mostly using natural dyes and pre-industrial techniques. It’s as much a small museum as a shop, and it’s a useful corrective to a day spent mostly among tourists.

Day 5: Eat, Pray, Leave Well Enough Alone

The final day asks a question this town has been asking itself for two decades: what does a place owe its own mythology?

Morning: a quiet walk, unplanned. After four days of itinerary, give yourself one morning without one. Follow whichever rice-paddy path or quiet lane looks better than the last.

Midday: the Eat Pray Love question. Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir, and the film that followed it, sent an enormous wave of visitors to Ubud in search of the town’s promise of healing and self-discovery, much of it centred on a real Balinese healer, Ketut Liyer, who died in 2016. His family has continued offering readings to tourists ever since. Opinions in Ubud about the book’s legacy are genuinely mixed: gratitude for the tourism income sits alongside real frustration at how much of the town’s identity has been flattened into a single narrative arc for outsiders. Neither reaction is wrong. Both are worth sitting with for a moment before deciding what you think Ubud actually is.

Afternoon: Neka Art Museum. A quieter, more scholarly counterpart to Puri Lukisan, founded in 1976 by the collector Suteja Neka, with galleries devoted to classical, modern and photographic Balinese art, including work by Spies and Bonnet. A good place to end a week of thinking about who gets to define a place, and how.

Evening: dinner facing a rice field, wherever you find one. Ubud rewards this more than almost any other stop on this trip. Let the last evening be unremarkable in the best sense.

Bookshops to Visit

A consolidated list, if you’d rather build your own route than follow the days above:

• Ganesha Bookshop (corner of Jalan Raya and Jalan Jembawan): Ubud’s essential independent bookshop, focused on Bali and Indonesia, trading since 1986
• Little Talks (Ani’s Villas, Campuhan): a small bookish café with river views, better for a slow read than a big purchase
• Periplus (Jalan Raya, opposite Lotus Restaurant): the reliable chain option for new English-language releases, and the official bookseller during festival week

Where to Stay

For a five-day, book-focused stay, three places carry more literary weight than a standard hotel:

Hotel Tjampuhan (Campuhan) puts you inside the actual history of Day 2, in the compound where Walter Spies once lived and where Pita Maha was founded. Rooms in the preserved Walter Spies House itself can be booked directly, if you want to sleep inside the story rather than just walk through it.

Komaneka at Monkey Forest (central Ubud, on Monkey Forest Road) began as an artists’ residence attached to the Komaneka Gallery before it became a hotel, and it still functions partly as one: a permanent art collection fills the lobby and grounds. Central enough for Day 1’s palace and bookshop route, quiet enough not to feel like it.

Honeymoon Guesthouse (Jalan Bisma) is owned by literary icon Janet DeNeefe herself, and staying here during festival week means a real chance of sharing a breakfast table with a visiting author. Outside festival season, it’s simply a calm, garden-set guesthouse a short walk from Casa Luna.

None of it needs to be luxurious. What matters is whether you can step outside and hear a temple bell or a rice-field breeze within a few minutes, which in Ubud is nearly always true.

Getting Around

Central Ubud (the palace, Saraswati Temple, Ganesha Bookshop, the market) is entirely walkable, and the walking is part of the point.

For Campuhan, Tegallalang, Goa Gajah and the Monkey Forest, distances stretch out quickly, and the roads aren’t built for casual strolling. A private driver, arranged through your accommodation or a ride app like Grab or Gojek, is the simplest option for a day trip. Renting a scooter is common among longer-term visitors, though less advisable for a first-timers given Ubud’s increasingly heavy traffic.

Most of what matters here, though, isn’t measured by transport time. It’s in a temple pond ten steps off the main road, a preserved studio inside a hotel most guests walk past without noticing, and a bookshop that will still recognise you the second time you visit.