My Indonesia

Introduction

Like a string of jewels in a coral sea, the 13,000-plus islands of Indonesian archipelago stretch almost 5000km from the Asian mainland into the Pacific Ocean. And like jewels, the islands have long represented wealth. A thousand years ago, the Chinese sailed as far as Timor to load up cargoes of sandalwood and beeswax; by the 16th century the spice islands of the Moluccas (Maluku) were luring European navigators in search of cloves, nutmeg and mace, once so rare and expensive that bloody wars were fought for the control of production and trade. The Dutch ruled for almost 350 years, drawing their fortunes from the islands where rich volcanic soil can produce two crops of rice a year, as well as support commercially valuable crops like coffee, sugar, tobacco, and teak.

Endowed with  a phenomenal array of natural resources and unique cultures, Indonesia became a magnet for every shade of entrepreneur from the west - a stamping ground for proselytising missionaries, unscrupulous traders, wayward adventurers and inspired artists. The country has been overrun by Dutch and Japanese armies; surveyed, drilled, dug up and shipped off by foreign mining companies; littered with ‘transmigrant’ of Java and Bali; and poked and prodded by ethnologists, linguists and anthropologists turning fading cultures into PhD theses.

More recently Indonesia has attracted a new breed of visitor - the modern-day tourist. Places like Bali, Lombok, Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, and the Hindu-Buddhist monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan in Central Java have attracted huge numbers of visitors. On the other hand, much of the country remains barely touched by mass tourism, despite great improvements in communications and transport connections. Indonesia’s thousands of islands and myriad cultures offer adventure that is hard to find in the modern world.

Indonesia possesses some of the most remarkable sights in South-East Asia and there are things about this country you will never forget: the flaming red and orange sunsets over the mouth of Sungai Kapuas (Kapuas River) in Kalimantan; standing on the summit of Kelimutu in Flores and gazing at the coloured lakes filling its volcanic craters; the lumbering leather-skinned dragons of Komodo; the funeral ceremonies of Toraja in the highlands of Central Sulawesi;the Dani tribesmen of Irian Jaya wearing little more than feathers and penis gourds; the skinned wayang puppets manipulated into life by the puppet-masters of Yogyakarta; and the briliant coral reefs off Manado on the north coast of Sulawesi.

You can relax on Kuta Beach in Bali, paddle a canoe down to the rivers of Kalimantan, surf at Nias off the coast of Sumatra, trek in the high country of Irian Jaya, eat your way through a kaleidoscope of fruit from one end of archipelago to other, stare down the craters of live volcanoes, learn the art of batik in Yogyakarta. or kite-making from any Indonesian kid - almost anything you want, Indonesia has it