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Guide to Riding ATVs in Ubud + Quad Biking in Bali Tips! 

ByKatie Caf Updated on

Riding ATVs in Bali through waterfalls and rice fields was one of the best things I’ve done on the island. The tour we did was an ATV bundled with white water rafting, for a whole day of adventure.

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✔️ Quick Guide – Best Bali ATV Tours

🏆 Best Adventure TourBali ATV Adventure Tour + Rafting
⏰ Best Quick TourUbud Jungle ATV With Hotel Transfer
👨‍👩‍👧 Best Private TourPrivate ATV Tour Through Ubud’s Gorilla Cave
🌋 Volcano Add-On TourSunrise Volcano Hike + ATV Tour
🤿 Beach Combo TourATV + Snorkeling at the Blue Lagoon
💰 Best Budget TourBudget Group ATV Tour

All About ATV & Quad Riding in Bali 

Ubud is a landlocked travel destination, so it doesn’t have a beach to attract tourists. What it does have is an awesome jungle landscape, full of rice terraces and natural waterfalls – Riding ATVs in Ubud is an adventurous activity that showcases the best of Ubud’s scenery. One of my favorite things about the tours in Bali is that you can customize and bundle them to suit whatever type of excursion you want. For example, we bundled our quad-bike tour in Ubud with white water rafting down the Telaga Waja River in Sidemen, for a full day of adrenaline!

Related Article: About White Water Adventure Rafting in Bali

Katie’s Tips ✶

There are many copycat ATV tour tracks in Ubud, and they’re not all equal. It’s hard to distinguish what are the better ATV companies since they usually use the same photos to advertise. I recommend going with tours that have all 5-star online reviews since I have heard some horror stories from travelers who were tricked by tour companies that use fake stock photos.

Blogger Katie Caf poses for a photo next to a bunch of red ATVs lined up in Ubud for a quad-biking tour through the jungle.
You can pay more for a quad bike with a higher CC engine.

Cost of ATV Riding in Ubud & Bali

The prices vary considerably by tour company if you’re booking a tandem vs solo ride, the engine CC of your quad bike, and if you’re booking an independent vs. a bundle tour. Generally, I would budget around $30-50 per person for the ATV tour in Ubud, and more if your tour includes transportation.

We paid $70 per person for an ATV + Rafting tour, per person, but it didn’t include transportation and we had to drive our own scooters. So, we paid around $35 for the ATV tour alone, but it would have been more expensive if we had booked a tour that included transportation.

For some tours, including ATV Riding, it’s cheaper right now to book through a tour agency rather than directly with the company. I did some research into this for this article (and because I’m always hunting for a deal).

The agency where I booked my ATV + Rafting bundle tour told me the providers they were working with, and I reached out to them and was quoted way more than double the price I was paying to book through an agent!

This is because the tour provider offers massive discounts to the agencies to get their business, so if you book direct and pay cash, you might get a worse deal 🤷‍♀️.

💰 Budget Tip! This tour is the cheapest I’ve ever seen a quad tour online, only $30 per ATV (so if you’re 2 people, $15 each!)

Blogger Katie Caf rides a red ATV through a mud puddle on an ATV tour in Ubud, Bali.

My Top Tips for Riding ATVs in Bali 

✅ Book a Private Tour!

We had a private tour, and you just get so much more out of the experience. Our guide doubled as our personal photographer for our whole trip, and since it was just us, we have our whole ATV tour documented!One of the biggest complaints travelers have about these quad tours is when there are too many people going slowly, and it causes a traffic jam. There’s not enough room on the ATV tracks for passing, so a traffic jam would be the end of the fun if even just one person is going slow or gets stuck.

✅ Consider Taking a Combo Tour

You can book an ATV half-day tour in Ubud, but if you bundle it with another tour option, for example, a high swing, Ubud highlights tour, or White Water Rafting, it’s an amazing all-day experience. That’s what we did when we booked our Quad-riding tour in Ubud, we bundled it with White Water Rafting for a long and adventurous day.

Blogger Katie Caf shows off the black knee-high rubber boots you're given on an ATV tour in Ubud, Bali. These boots are designed to protect you from mud puddles on the tour.
They give you knee-high boots and plastic “socks” for the Quad-Bike tours.

✅ Know About the “Bali Sock”

Right when we arrived we were given knee-high mud boots and plastic bags. “What’s this?” I asked, and our guide replied “The Bali Sock!” 😂. You cover your feet with the plastic bag and then use a rubber band to make sure it stays put. I’m sure it helped a little bit, but my feet were still soaked by the end of our ATV tour!

Blogger Katie Caf poses for a selfie covered in Mud, showcasing how dirty you get after an ATV and white water rafting combo tour in Ubud, Bali.
How dirty I was after our Ubud ATV & Rafting tour (those aren’t freckles, they’re mud!)

✅ Prepare to Get MUDDY!

The tires kick up mud as the ATV drives so prepare to get super muddy. Especially if you’re in a group, the more ATVs, the more mud getting kicked up!

✅ Wear Full-Coverage Clothes for Safety

Just for safety reasons, you might want to wear full-coverage clothing (long sleeves, long pants) for the ATV tour. It’s not required, but you might drive past a stick or something that can scratch you.

Blogger Katie Caf poses for a photo with her hand raised in the air while riding a red ATV scooter in Ubud, Bali. In the background, another ATV rider poses for a photo.

✅ You Can Book a Tandem or Solo Ride

You have the option with most ATV tours to either book a Tandem ride, which is when you share a bike or a solo ride. The solo rides cost a bit more since you’re using two ATVs instead of one. I did my ATV tour tandem, and it was nice since we got to switch off with the driving.

Blogger Katie Caf rides on the back of a red ATV going very fast on a quad-bike tour in Ubud, Bali. The ATV is speeding through a deep mud-puddle, and water is going everywhere.

✅ Take an ATV Tour With Lots of 5-Star Reviews – Not All ATV Companies in Bali are Good

There are some bad reports online from quad-biking tour companies in Ubud that let 20+ people join a tour at once. The ATV tracks aren’t wide enough to allow passing, so all taking tours that big does is cause traffic jams. We had a little bit of a traffic jam on our ATV tour, and that’s because the group in front of us wouldn’t stop taking photos 😂. If there are too many people in a group, or if there’s not enough time between when the ATV tour groups depart, it will cause a traffic jam.

Katie’s Tips ✶

Quad biking is one of the activities I wouldn’t book unless it was with a company with 5-star reviews because being stuck in traffic on an ATV is no fun for anyone!

Best ATV Tours in Ubud

#1 TOP PICK

🏎 ATV + Telaga Waja Rafting Adventure Tour

✔️ ATV + Rafting Tour in Bali
✔️ All-Day Tour
✔️ Optional Hotel Transfer
✔️ Includes Lunch

→ Book It!
#2 TOP PICK

🙈 PRIVATE ATV Tour At Ubud’s Gorilla Cave

✔️ Most famous ATV site in Bali
✔️ Private tour – no traffic jams!
✔️ Private tour guide/photographer
✔️ Includes transport & buffet lunch

→ Book It!
#3 TOP PICK

🚗 ATV Half-Day Tour + Transport

✔️ Optional Transport from all the main areas of Bali
✔️ Chose between riding tandem or solo
✔️ Includes Indonesian buffet lunch

→ Book It!

Full-Day Bali Adventure Tour with Quad Bikes and Rafting < What We Did!

This ATV and rafting combo tour is one of the BEST tours I’ve ever taken in Bali!  The adventure combo of ATV riding in Ubud, and then visiting the Telaga Waja River for rafting after was an incredibly fun day.  

My friend and I chose to share an ATV, aka ride Tandem, which means we shared a bike. If you choose to ride tandem, you get a decent discount for the cost of the tour, and it’s also nice because while one person is driving the other can enjoy how crazy the experience is. On our adventure ATV tour we were taken through tunnels and under waterfalls in Ubud. While some parts of the ATV track were manmade, like the tunnel with Balinese-style carvings at the entrance, it still felt adventurous. 

The river tour was another hidden gem, with plenty of waterfall stops along the way while snaking our raft through gorgeous rice-field line ravines. After each leg of our tour, we were treated to a surprisingly fresh Indonesian buffet meal. The ATV & Telaga Waja River Rafting tour is the best combo tour I’ve done so far through all of my travels in Bali! 

What the tour includes

✔️ Optional hotel transport
✔️ Adventure rafting on Telaga Waja River
✔️ ATV waterfall tour in Ubud
✔️ Optional private or tandem ATV
✔️ Buffet lunch

👉 Check Out Adventure Rafting Tour 👈

I took an ATV tour in Ubud when I was living there for six months and my friend came to visit I wanted to show him all the best that the town had to offer.

It’s crazy how you can live somewhere for months and months and never do the most popular activities! For example, I’ve been in Ubud alone for over half a year and I’ve never gone to the purifying water temple. 

When I worked in Manhattan on 34th and Madison, I never went to the top of the Empire State Building (even though I went to the Starbucks on the ground floor almost every day!) – It’s just one of those things when you get used to a location and stop exploring. 

However, I’m SO HAPPY I chose to do an ATV + Rafting combo adventure tour in Ubud. 

I’ve been traveling Bali and Indonesia for four years and it’s one of the best tours I’ve done on Bali mainland, up there with swimming with the dolphins in Lovina and taking a Sunrise Kintamani volcano tour of Mt. Batur. 

Our ATV + Rafting combo tour was a day of pure adventure where we got to zip around through foot-deep mud puddles, drive under natural waterfalls, up rickety ramps, and through tunnels. 

To be honest, while there were elements of the ATV track that we could tell were artificial, it also felt like we were driving through the jungle Indiana Jones-style. 

I’m very happy I did the ATV tour with my friend since I had recently crashed while driving scooters in Bali, I was a bit timid with ATV driving. 

Then my friend, who is a crazy guy who isn’t nearly as afraid of tipping the ATV over as I am, took over the driving and we were zipping around corners and through deep puddles. 

Our tour guide asked for our phone at the beginning of the tour, and typical of Bali tour guides, he went above and beyond taking photos and videos of us on our tour. 

If you have the budget for it, I recommend booking a private tour so you can get this type of personal attention we had. The tour went through a jungle track, into tunnels, through foot-deep puddles, and under natural waterfalls – it was beautiful! 

Katie Caf

Katie Caf, founder of Katie Caf Travel, is a seasoned travel expert who has explored over 30 countries and lived abroad in places like Egypt, Morocco, Mexico, India, Indonesia Thailand, Europe, and the USA. Her goal is to help other traveler see the world by providing first-hand accounts of what to expect on the road.

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