Kelingking Beach: The View Is Free, the Climb Down Is Not for Everyone

Kelingking is the photograph of Nusa Penida: a headland shaped like a dinosaur's head and neck, with a white beach in the crook of it and blue water a couple of hundred metres below. The viewpoint is a few minutes from the car park along the cliff, and that view is genuinely as good as the pictures.

The beach at the bottom is a separate proposition, and the difference between the two is the thing to understand before you go.

The path to the sand runs down the spine of the headland: steep, loose, in places almost a scramble, with bamboo railings that are more suggestion than support and long stretches with a drop on one side. It takes most people forty-five minutes to an hour to go down and longer, in full sun, to come back up. There is no shade and no water on it.

It is doable for fit adults in proper shoes with a litre of water each. It is not for flip-flops, for small children, for anyone with knees that complain on stairs, or for the hour after lunch. Plenty of people start down, look at the second section, and sensibly turn round.

The sand is soft and white and the setting, enclosed by cliffs, is extraordinary. The sea is not for swimming. The beach faces the open Indian Ocean with no reef to break the swell, the shore break dumps hard, and there is a rip that pulls straight out. People have drowned here, most of them strong swimmers who went in to their waist. Paddle at the very edge if you must; do not go in.

The viewpoint is on every day-trip route and by ten in the morning there is a queue for the photo spot and a car park full of vans. Before nine, or after three when the day-trippers head for the boat, it is calm and the light is better.

Staying a night on the island is what makes the early hour possible without a 4am start on Bali. For a day trip, this is the stop to do first, before the others.