Three nights is the number everyone who has been here gives, and it is not a round number chosen for the sake of it. Two nights in Sidemen is one day, because the drive in eats an afternoon and the drive out eats a morning, and the valley does not do anything for you in a single day. The third night is the first one you spend without a suitcase in the room.
What follows is not a schedule. It is the shape three days takes when people stop trying to fit the rest of the island into them.
Day one: arrive, and stop moving
Most arrivals get into the valley between two and five in the afternoon, whichever direction they have come from. The airport run is two to two and a half hours; Ubud is about an hour and a half. Either way the last twenty minutes are the slow part, up a narrowing road that switches back on itself, and you will arrive later than the map said.
Check in and then do nothing for an hour. That is not filler advice. The change of pace between the south of Bali and this valley is the thing you came for, and it takes about an hour to land.
Before the light goes, walk twenty minutes out of your gate on whichever path runs downhill, then turn around and come back. You are not going anywhere. You are finding out what the valley looks like at five in the afternoon, which is the best hour it has, and where the path you will take tomorrow morning begins.
Eat where you are staying. Kitchens in the valley wind down around nine, the lanes are unlit, and going out to find dinner on a road you have seen once, in the dark, is more trouble than any first night is worth.
Day two: the long walk
This is the day the whole trip is arranged around, and every part of it starts on foot from the village.
Out by seven. Mount Agung is a morning event or it is nothing. On a clear day the mountain is out at first light and has built its own cloud by ten or eleven, and after that you are looking at grey. Seven to nine is also the coolest, most pleasant walking of the day, and the only stretch you will enjoy climbing back up in.
The walk down to the river. The terrace paths run from the edge of the village down towards the Unda at the bottom of the valley. They are earth banks, built and maintained by farmers to reach their own plots, and nothing about them was laid out for visitors. There is no route, no signage and no entrance. Pick a path going down, keep the ridge behind you, and you will not get lost in a valley this shape.
Down and back is roughly four hours at a walking pace with stops. You will pass farmers, a few dogs and almost nobody else. Wear trainers rather than sandals: the banks are often wet, sometimes no wider than your foot, and there is a drop on one side of most of them.
The Unda itself is stony, fast and cold. It is a place to sit for half an hour in the coolest air in the valley, not a swim.
The afternoon. A weaving workshop in the village. Sidemen is one of the last places in Bali still making endek and songket by hand on backstrap looms, and the work happens in the front rooms of family compounds rather than in a building put up for tour groups. You can watch, you can ask questions, and you can buy without any of it being a performance. An hour is enough; two if somebody starts explaining the pattern.
The evening. Back up to the ridge for the last of the light across the terraces, and then the frogs. That is the entire evening, and after a day like that it is plenty.
Day three: pick exactly one thing
The mistake on the last day is trying for two. Everything below is a car and most of a day once the driving is counted, and doing two of them turns your last day in the valley into a day of being driven around east Bali.
Temples. Besakih, the mother temple, is about thirty minutes north on the flank of Agung and should be done early, before the coach parties arrive from the south. Tirta Gangga, the water palace with the stepping stones over the carp pond, is about an hour east. The two pair only if you leave at seven and accept that lunch will be late.
Water. Gembleng waterfall sits above the valley: a short and genuinely steep walk in to a set of shallow tiered pools that look out over the terraces rather than up at a rock face. It is unlike the waterfalls in the middle of the island, and it is the one near here worth the climb.
River. Rafting the Telaga Waja, which puts in up the valley near Muncan and runs down through gorges and past waterfalls to a take-out below. It is a half day, it is properly good, and it is the only adrenaline available within an hour of Sidemen.
If you have a fourth night
Take it. The fourth is the first day with no arrival and no departure in it, and it is the one where people stop planning and start walking somewhere for no reason. A fifth is where they begin quietly rearranging the rest of the trip.
If you only have two
Come anyway, and spend the one full day walking. Skip the third-day options entirely, because Besakih and back will consume the only real day you have. It will be good and you will wish you had booked the third night, which is what almost everybody says.
