Rice Field Walks Around Canggu: Where the Paddies Still Are and When to Walk Them

Canggu was rice fields until about 2010, and the villas have eaten most of them; the paddies that survive are the gaps between developments, and each year there are fewer. But the gaps are real, they are still farmed, and the network of raised bunds and concrete paths that farmers use to reach them is walkable. The best known is the Canggu shortcut, the narrow path between Batu Bolong and Berawa that motorbikes and walkers share, with fields on both sides for most of its length. It is a twenty-minute walk and a fair picture of what the whole area looked like.

For fields that go to the horizon, go north. Pererenan, the next village up the coast, still has broad paddies behind the beach with the mountains behind them on a clear morning. Cemagi and Kedungu, ten to twenty minutes further, are proper farming villages with the subak channels running between the plots, the shrines at the corners of the fields and almost no visitors. A morning walk through Kedungu's fields to its black-sand beach, or a guided village walk in Cemagi, is the closest to the rural Bali that the postcards mean without driving to Ubud.

Early. Between 6:30 and 8:00 the light is low, the farmers are out, ducks are being herded along the channels, and the air is cool; by nine the fields are bright, hot and empty. The hour before sunset is the second window. On the paths, step aside for farmers and for the motorbikes that use the bunds as roads, do not walk on the field edges when the rice is young, and expect a farmer occasionally to ask a few thousand rupiah for crossing their land, which is fair. Ask before photographing people at work; most say yes.

For the same landscape at scale, Jatiluwih and Tegallalang are covered in the day trips from Canggu guide and the Ubud terraces guide.