Ubud in a Day, With Children in Tow
Ubud is on every itinerary and reliably produces the worst day of the family holiday. The reasons are consistent: people leave too late, try to fit in four attractions, spend three hours in a car, and arrive at the monkey forest with an overheated and underfed child at half past two. Done differently it is one of the loveliest days on the island.
Leave early, and earlier than you want to. On the road by eight from the Seminyak side puts you in Ubud in around an hour and a quarter; leaving at ten can easily double that, and the return journey in the late afternoon is worse. Early departure is the single decision that determines how this day goes, and everything else is secondary to it.
Pick two things, not five. A rice terrace walk and one other - the market, the palace, a craft village, the monkey forest - is a full and satisfying day at a child's pace. The standard four-stop tour that circulates online is designed for a coach party with no under-tens in it, and attempting it with a family means seeing everything from a car window.
The terraces are best first thing and genuinely magical when they are empty. Get to Tegallalang or the quieter fields outside town before the coaches, walk a path between the plots rather than photographing from the roadside platform, and let children take it at their own speed. Take water, take a hat, and expect the walking to be more up and down than it looks.
Be realistic about the monkey forest. Children love it and it is a genuine highlight, but the macaques are wild, food-motivated and entirely willing to take a bag, a hat, a phone or a pair of sunglasses. Carry nothing loose, no food whatsoever, no plastic bags, and keep small children within arm's reach. Handled sensibly it is wonderful; handled casually it produces the day's one bad memory.
Break the day properly for lunch, and do it early. Ubud is full of good places to eat with room to sit, shade and a view of something green, and an hour in one of them at half past eleven resets everybody for the afternoon. Trying to push through to a two o'clock lunch after a hot morning is where these days usually come apart.
Then head back before the afternoon build-up. Leaving Ubud around three gets you home in reasonable time; leaving at five means an hour and a half of stop-start with tired children in the back. If the group is up for it, the alternative is to stay for dinner and travel back late once the traffic has cleared, which works well with older children and badly with small ones.
The general principle is the one that governs most of Bali with a family: fewer things, done earlier, with a proper break in the middle. Ubud rewards that approach enormously - the terraces at eight in the morning with nobody else on the path is a better memory than four attractions seen through a windscreen.