Bali traffic: why 35 kilometres takes ninety minutes

In the south, roughly — it reads live congestion well enough. North of Ubud it is consistently optimistic, because it underestimates how slow the mountain roads are even when they are empty. And it has no way at all of knowing about a ceremony closure, which is the delay that actually ruins schedules here.

Roughly 07:00 to 09:00 and 16:00 to 19:00, and the airport corridor is the worst of it. If you have a flight, an afternoon departure means leaving far earlier than the distance suggests — that is the single most common way a good trip ends badly.

Your driver reroutes, and usually knew about it beforehand — these are announced locally even when they appear nowhere online. If it is unavoidable, you get told what it will cost you in time rather than sitting in it wondering. Nobody can move a ceremony, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Yes, but briefly. Heavy afternoon rain slows everything for an hour or two, then clears. The bigger seasonal effect is July, August and late December, when volume alone adds thirty to forty-five minutes to the southern routes all day.

Yes — that is most of the point of having your own car. Tell the driver and the rest of the day gets re-cut around it. The only things that cannot move are the ones with a clock on them, and he will tell you honestly whether a change still leaves time for them.