Tegenungan is the one big waterfall on Bali that never went up the mountain. Almost every other fall on the island is hidden in the volcanic highlands of the north. This one drops barely ninety metres above sea level, just south of Ubud, where the Petanu river comes over a lip of dark rock in a curtain of white about fifteen metres high. A short stairway below the road gets you to the bottom of it. That is precisely why it is the busiest and most photographed waterfall in Bali: almost anyone can stand at its foot. The pool is wide and shelves gently at the edges, so you wade in off the boulders and swim. Close to the rock under the drop, the noise and the cold mist take over everything, and the spray reaches well past the pool and soaks you inside a minute. Between April and October the water runs a clear green and the pool is at its calmest; the rains from November turn it browner and far stronger.
The far bank is the quieter half. The river splits the site between two villages, and each grew its own way down, so locals know the fall by two names — Tegenungan from the Ubud side, Blangsinga from the village opposite. The path down the eastern, Blangsinga side ends on terraces that put you level with the curtain across the gorge, with far fewer people on them than the pool. From the café terraces up on the rim it shrinks again, to a single white column dropping into a pool far below in a steep green valley. And the river doing all this is one that older Balinese belief treats with dread. In the story the god Indra killed the tyrant-king Mayadenawa, who had banned worship across the island, and the blood that poured out of him became the Petanu. For ten centuries people here held that rice watered from it would bleed and stink, and that any king who bathed in it would lose his throne.