Mount Batur at sunset: the same crater, the other end of the day

$27 — the walk, in reverse. The same guided ascent as the famous morning one, with the day running the other way. You start in the afternoon, you can see the path you are walking on, and you eat at the top while the light goes long across the caldera. The listing quotes seven to ten hours because it includes the transfers and the time on the mountain at both ends of the light. It costs $27, which is exactly what the classic morning walk costs — nobody is charging a premium for the quiet.

The practical differences from the morning version are all in your favour if you are not a natural early riser. You have slept. You have eaten. You are walking up in daylight, which means the loose upper section is something you can see rather than something you feel through a boot. And the descent, which on the morning tours happens in the full sun of a Bali eight a.m., happens here in cooling air.

$20 — the two-hour run. The shortest listing on this site and one of the most useful. A 4WD takes you up to the rim, either during the day or timed for sunset, and the natural hot spring is part of the fare. Two hours means it fits into a day that already has other things in it, which is why it carries 575 reviews at 4.7 despite being the least demanding thing here. If you are staying in the highlands rather than driving up from the coast, this is the listing that makes an evening on the rim a casual decision rather than an expedition.

What about the stars? Here we have to be careful. The rim is high, the valley below it is dark, and on a clear night after the light goes there is very little in the way of town glow in your eyeline. That is the honest description of the place. What no operator can sell you, and what we are not going to imply, is a guaranteed sky. Cloud comes over this caldera in every month of the year, evening as readily as morning, and the same layer that hides a sunrise hides everything above it.

What the evening gives you. Sleep, first of all, and that is not a small thing on a two-week trip. Then daylight on the way up, a rim that is not shoulder to shoulder, a descent in cooling air rather than rising heat, and an evening meal somewhere on the way home instead of a wasted afternoon spent catching up on the night you lost.

What the dawn gives you. The thing people fly here for: the particular sequence of a volcano summit going from black to grey to gold while cloud sits in the valley beneath you. It is genuinely different from watching the sun go down, and the eleven thousand reviews behind $27 are not eleven thousand people being polite. If you only have one morning and this is the reason you came up here, take the morning.

Who should take the evening. Anyone travelling with people who will not enjoy a two a.m. start; anyone who has already done the sunrise on a previous trip; anyone whose week is already broken up by early flights; and anyone who values an empty rim over the specific drama of a dawn. Also, frankly, anyone who wants to photograph the caldera without other people in the frame.

And the compromise. $20 at two hours is the listing that lets you have the rim at the end of a day you were already spending up here — after the pools, after lunch by the lake — without committing the whole evening to it.

A search for sunset in Bali does not usually produce a volcano. It produces the coast, and specifically the west-facing coast in the south of the island, where the sun goes down into the sea and there is a bar built to watch it from. That is a different evening and it is worth saying so plainly rather than pretending the two compete.

The names that come back from those searches are all clifftop and beachfront venues in the south and south-west: la brisa Bali sunset, el kabron Bali sunset, savaya Bali sunset, rock bar Bali sunset, potato head Bali sunset and single fin Bali sunset are all, in one form or another, somewhere to sit with a drink facing the water. Searches for a sunset bar Bali or a Bali sunset dinner are looking for the same thing. Further round the island, sunset point amed Bali is on the east coast, where the sun sets behind the mountains rather than into the sea — which is exactly the geography we have up here. Indonesian searchers asking sunset Bali jam berapa simply want to know what time to be in position.

None of those are on this site, and none of them involve a caldera. What this mountain offers instead is elevation and space: a crater floor, a lake, a ridge line and the light moving across all three at once, with the nearest bar a long way below you. People who come up for Bali rice terraces sunset on the way home are chasing something related — landscape rather than a venue.

So if somebody tells you they know the best sunset Bali has to offer, they are almost certainly talking about a stretch of coast. This is not that, and it is not trying to be. It is the quiet one, at the same fare as the busy morning, on a rim where you may well be able to count the other people.