20 Things to Do Alone in Bali

Bali has a strange effect on solo travelers.

It’s one of the easiest places on earth to arrive by yourself — the infrastructure is built for it, half the island is other people who also flew in alone, and nobody has ever once been surprised to see a foreigner eating nasi campur at a warung with no company. It should be the least lonely place in the world.

And yet. You scroll the feed on the flight over and it’s all couples on swings and friend groups at beach clubs, and then you land in Canggu on a Tuesday afternoon and realize the island has quietly sorted itself into people who already know each other. The nomads have their coworking table. The yoga crowd has their studio. Everyone seems two weeks deeper into their friendships than you are.

The fix isn’t finding more things to do — Bali will drown you in things to do. The fix is knowing which things naturally put you next to other people, and which ones are better precisely because you’re alone.

Here are twenty of both, sorted by where you’re actually based.

Ubud: green, slow, and unexpectedly easy alone

1. Do a sunrise yoga class. Ubud’s yoga scene has been running long enough to have properly figured out the solo traveler. Jungle-facing studios, drop-in classes as the default rather than the exception, and a room full of people who all showed up by themselves. Start here on your first morning; it recalibrates the whole trip.

2. Walk the Campuhan Ridge at sunrise. A grassy ridge trail just outside the centre of town, at its best — and quietest — in the hour after dawn, before the heat and the tripods arrive. Free, forty minutes, and the best photos you’ll take all week.

3. Walk the Tegallalang rice terraces. The iconic stepped paddies just north of town. Get there early, before the tour buses, and it’s a genuinely peaceful walk through the terraces rather than a queue for a photo spot. Go at 10am and you’ll understand why people complain about Bali.

4. Wander the Monkey Forest. Temple ruins, enormous banyan trees and several hundred long-tailed macaques, right in the middle of town. Low-key, shaded, an hour well spent. Keep sunglasses and snacks packed away — the macaques are not sentimental.

5. Take a Balinese cooking class. The good ones start at the market, walking you past ingredients you’ve been eating all week without identifying, then move to a kitchen for a full spread. Small groups, several hours, shared food at the end. It is close to the most reliable friend-making mechanism on the island and nobody talks about it enough.

6. Read in a café for an entire afternoon. Ubud’s café culture is built for this — garden seating, slow service that’s actually a feature, no pressure to leave. There’s a version of solo travel that’s frantically filling the calendar so you don’t notice you’re alone, and there’s the version where you sit under a tree with a book for four hours because you can. Aim for the second one.

Canggu: where the other solo travelers already are

7. Take a surf lesson. Canggu’s beach breaks are among the most beginner-friendly on the island, and group lessons dissolve the awkwardness entirely — you’re all equally bad, in the water, being shouted at by the same instructor. Very hard to stay a stranger through that.

8. Have a coworking day. The scene here is built around the digital-nomad crowd: solid wifi, good coffee, and a room of people working alone who are, without exception, looking for an excuse to stop working alone. Take the shared table, not the booth.

9. Play pickup beach volleyball. Beachfront courts in Canggu and Kuta run casual games most afternoons, and walking up to ask if you can join is completely normal — it’s basically the intended way to get a game going. Free, sunset-timed, and it skips small talk entirely.

10. Go to a nomad meetup. Canggu’s long-term remote-work community runs regular casual meetups. It sounds like networking; it is really just a room of people who’ve all been in your exact position within the last month, comparing visa runs and scooter horror stories.

11. Spend an evening at a board game café. A handful of cafés keep shelves of games out for the evening crowd. Low pressure, no obligation to be interesting for the first twenty minutes, and the game supplies the conversation until you don’t need it to.

12. Do a beach club day. Daybeds, pools, DJ sets facing the ocean. It’s the priciest thing on this list by a distance and you’ll spend in an afternoon what a week of warung lunches costs. But they’re designed for mingling across a shared pool deck, and if you’re going to blow the budget once, blow it on the thing that comes with people attached.

Uluwatu: cliffs, surf, and a very good sunset

13. Watch the sun set from the clifftop temple. Bali’s classic sunset: temple grounds on a cliff edge, Indian Ocean straight ahead, and a mixed crowd of travelers who all end up lingering on the same wall for the same forty minutes. Arrive early enough to get a spot.

14. Watch the reef breaks. You don’t have to surf Uluwatu — most people shouldn’t. From the warung terraces above the break you can watch some of the best surfers on the island for an hour with a cold drink, and it’s genuinely mesmerizing. One of the purest solo activities in Bali.

15. Stay for the Kecak fire dance. A traditional chant-and-fire performance staged at the clifftop temple as the light goes. Dozens of voices, no instruments, fire, and the ocean behind it. You watch it alone but not alone — the crowd experiences it together, which is a different thing.

Get out: the days that make the trip

16. Trek Mount Batur for sunrise. Groups leave in the dark to summit for first light over the caldera lake. It’s guided, it’s popular, and it’s near-impossible to do without getting to know the four people climbing at your pace in the dark. You’ll be exhausted by 9am. Worth it.

17. Take a scooter into the hills and find a waterfall. The Bali rite of passage. North of Ubud, inland, at whatever pace you want — nobody to negotiate with about lunch stops or turning back. Go slowly, wear the helmet, don’t ride it if you’ve never ridden one.

18. Day trip to Nusa Penida. A boat from Sanur reaches the dramatic cliffs and turquoise coves of the neighbouring island. Usually done as a day tour, which is exactly what makes it easy to join alone — same boat, same schedule, same eleven hours with the same people.

19. Go snorkeling. Amed on the east coast and the waters around Nusa Penida are calm and reef-fringed enough to snorkel straight off the beach or on a short boat trip. Bring your own mask if you’re fussy about it.

20. Sunset at Tanah Lot. A sea temple perched on a rock just offshore, silhouetted as the sun goes down. Yes, it’s on every postcard. It’s on every postcard because it’s very good.

The actual problem with solo travel in Bali

It isn’t the days. The days are fine — the days are great, which is most of why people come.

It’s the gap. It’s 5pm, you’ve finished work at the coworking space, everyone’s packing up into groups that already exist, and you’re deciding between the sunset you’d rather not watch by yourself and going back to your room. It’s wanting to do the Batur trek but not enough to book it alone. It’s the tenth dinner in a row where you eat with your phone.

Look back at the list: the trek, the surf lesson, the cooking class, the volleyball, the meetup, the beach club, the Penida boat. Every one of those is better with one or two other people, and costs you nothing if it doesn’t happen. They’re not plans that require friends. They’re plans with room in them.

That gap is the whole reason we built Suppertime.

Don’t do it alone, do it on Suppertime: Travel Friends

Suppertime shows you a live map of what travelers are doing in Bali right now.

Someone’s on the 4am van to Batur tomorrow. Someone’s heading to Uluwatu for sunset in an hour. Someone booked a cooking class in Ubud and has two spots left.

Tap a plan. Show up. Meet people.

No swiping. No DMs. No profiles to maintain or three-day conversations that never turn into anyone actually leaving the house. Just download the app and you’re in.

There are guides like this for 50+ other cities too — Lisbon, Mexico City, Bangkok, Tokyo, Tbilisi, Cape Town and more.