I recently took a trip to Southeast Asia with one of our stops being Bali. We only had about a week in Bali, so we decided to visit Nusa Penida as a day trip, meaning we would get picked up by a tour group at 6:30 AM and returned to our hotel that evening. If you know where Nusa Penida is, it is an island off the coast of Bali that you have to take a ferry to access.
Here are some reasons why I suggest you opt to spend more time here, or at least an overnight stay to break up your trip to the island:
🛥️The Ferry Process
- Getting to Nusa Penida: Even if you have booked your tour via a tour company, you still end up taking the public ferry over to the island. The ferry we took had no ventilation, was packed with 75 other people, took over 30 minutes to load and depart. It made for a not so fun start to the day.
- Getting back to Bali: The return ferry process was even worse. There are waiting areas where you wait for your boat to be called. The entire group heads out to the start of the dock with hundreds of other people for you to then wait another 30 minutes for your color boarding pass to be called. There is no shade, people are confused and frustrated. Once your ferry gets called, everyone makes a bee-line to the boat in hopes of getting a good seat with ventilation.
- A tip for your ferry journey: If you are willing to purchase Bintangs (the local Indonesian beer) then you can be invited to the top deck of the ferry – which we happily did. That ended up being the best part of the day.
🚗Getting around the island
- You thought the roads in Bali were narrow? They’re even worse on Nusa Penida. Roads that are supposed to be meant for two way traffic are the width of one small car. To go less than 10 miles can take upwards of 50 minutes because so much time is spent pulling off the road to let cars go. For a day trip, you end up spending most of your time in a car in traffic.
🏖️Visiting the sites
- Nusa Penida has so many beautiful viewpoints and beaches that we wished we would have had more time to explore them. If you visited Nusa Penida as an overnight trip, you would have more time to explore these spots.
- Stop 1: Angel’s Billabong and Broken Beach: The views here are beautiful. You could spend time here watching the water crash along the rocks and even do more exploring.
- Stop 2: Kelingking Beach: This is one of the most famous beaches in the world. If you’re on Pinterest, I’m sure you’ve seen all the influencers taking photos here. There is also a hike you can take all the way down to the beach, which had almost no on there. If we had more time, I would have taken the hike down.
- Stop 3: Crystal Bay: We had the most time at Crystal Bay. We stopped here for about 2 hours at the end of our day where we could relax and go in the water.
Still want to take a day trip to Nusa Penida?
If you still want to visit Nusa Penida as a day trip, you can book using the tour we traveled with. There were 4 of us on the tour, which made it feel like a private tour.
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