About Tukad Cepung Waterfall (Air Terjun Tukad Cepung)
The Tukad Cepung Waterfall is one of Bali’s most famous waterfalls as it blew up on the socials in recent years.
The attribute that attracted the Instagram Lemmings effect was that the main waterfall tended to be accompanied by sun beams penetrating the humid, mist-filled air.
While this “god-beam” effect is nothing new in Nature, all it took was one person sharing the juxtaposition of the sun beams with the falls, and before you know it, the falls then becomes a viral bucket-list attraction.
However, a little known fact about the Tukad Cepung Waterfall experience was that there’s a second waterfall that you can experience in the same entrance ticket.
Thus, it’s certainly yet another waterfall worth checking out while staying in Ubud, which is one of the most popular cities to stay in Bali given its many temples and tourist amenities.
Timing The Tukad Cepung Waterfall
Given that the internet has sold you on witnessing the Tukad Cepung Waterfall with “god beams”, it’s natural to ask when to time your visit to witness this effect.
To make a long story short, you’ll want to time your visit for some time around 9:15am to 9:30am give or take.
This is based on our own observations since we made our visit to the falls in mid-June 2022 though we didn’t stick around past 9am since lots of people were making their way into the gorge at that time.
We actually showed up early to maintain social distancing, and we didn’t want to contend with the crowds just to recreate the god beam effect right at the waterfall.
That said, we did witness the nice god beam effect further down the narrow canyon, and we pretty much beat the rush on our way out as we noticed dozens of groups or parties going in the opposite direction right after 9am.
As for the longevity of the flow of the Tukad Cepung Waterfalls, we noticed that there were lots of rice fields and irrigation ditches along the walking path down to the falls.
This caused Mom and I to surmise that the flow of Tukad Cepung (Cepung River or “Flowing River” in Balinese) may have been aided through diversion so that it’s likely to have flow throughout the year.
However, if there’s a thunderstorm, then there could easily be a flash flood inundating the gorge that the Tukad Cepung Waterfall is in.
It’s for that reason that I wouldn’t linger around here in the afternoon when the pop-up thunderstorms tend to dump their load.
Experiencing The Tukad Cepung Waterfall
From the car park for the Tukad Cepung Waterfall (see directions below), we pretty much walked past some shelters then around a lawn area fronting a shrine that was primarily used for worshipping or praying.
Off to the left side of the lawn area was a signed walkway leading to a ticket booth (we paid IDR 15k per person as of June 2022).
Beyond the ticket booth, we continued following the concrete walkway down steps, past an irrigation ditch by a four-legged statue, and towards a handful of warungs.
The path continued descending between these local businesses and would eventually get past more local buildings and shrines before bottoming out by more irrigation ditches (roughly 300m from the car park).
The concrete path pretty much followed along the irrigation ditch with some side channels seemingly feeding the neighboring rice fields.
Eventually after another 300m of walking along the irrigation ditch, the path then descended the last flight of steps dropping right into a dark and narrow gorge.
At the bottom of this set of steps, we saw a sign pointing in two different directions.
It turned out that the path on the right (downstream) followed along the gorge past some stream crossings towards a tall, plunging waterfall.
This was the secondary waterfall which we noticed that the majority of visitors actually skip, though I estimated its height to be around 15m (based on extrapolating from Mom standing at the base of the falls).
So we then went in the other direction upstream into the depths of the impressive narrows where there was a small shrine as well as a ladder onto a boulder to aid in taking Instagram shots when the god beams would actually penetrate the gorge floor here.
Eventually, the path dead-ended at the main Tukad Cepung Waterfall, where there was limited real estate to view the falls let alone get your picture taken, especially as more people crowd the area to get their Instagram shots.
Again, since we suspected that the tukad (river) contained some irrigation ditch and rice field runoff, we do question the water quality since we don’t know what kind of chemicals are being used to treat the rice.
As a result, this made us hesitate to spend too much time bathing or breathing in the waterfall’s mist.
Nevertheless, from looking at the handful of people standing before the foot of the falls and extrapolating their height, I estimated that this waterfall was about 10m tall.
When all was said and done, we probably walked about 1.2km round-trip, but the upside down nature of the walk made it uncomfortably hot and sweaty, and we spent about 90 minutes away from the car.
Authorities
The Tukad Cepung Waterfall resides in the Bangli Regency near the village of Bangli in Bali Province, Indonesia. It may be administered by the Bangli Regency local government. For information or inquiries about the area as well as current conditions, you can try visiting this website.
The Tukad Cepung Waterfall resides near the village of Bangli in the Bangli Regency.
However, since we were driven to the car park for the Tukad Cepung Waterfall from Ubud, I won’t bother with giving driving directions, but you can look at the embedded map above for your trip planning needs.
Moreover, I can say that it took an hour for our driver to do the 28km drive to get from central Ubud to the Tukad Cepung Waterfall car park.
Keep in mind that our drive took place early in the morning so traffic wasn’t much of a problem, but this amount of time can easily increase later in the day.
For geographical context, Bangli is about 22km (over 30 minutes drive) northeast of Ubud, about 48km (over 1 hour drive) northeast of Kuta, about 46km (under 90 minutes drive) east of Canggu, 46km (under 90 minutes drive) east of Seminyak, and 83km (about 2.5 hours drive) south of Lovina.
Note that you’ll want to take the drive times with a grain of salt mostly because the traffic situation (especially in Southern Bali) is pretty bad and unpredictable.
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Right to left sweep of the 2nd waterfall
Another comprehensive sweep of the falls in the grotto area
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