Tegallalang rice terraces
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Indonesia.
Read MoreKomodo National Park
A closer look at one of Indonesia's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreKawah Ijen’s blue flames
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Indonesia.
Read MoreIndonesia is too vast to see so much as to sample, an archipelago of seventeen thousand islands scattered across three time zones, and every sample I’ve taken has been distinct enough to feel like a different country. Bali’s rice terraces and temple ceremonies get the postcards, and deserve them, but I’ve found equal reward further out — diving Komodo’s reefs alongside its dragons, watching sulphur miners haul baskets from Kawah Ijen’s blue-flamed crater at 3am, or simply sitting in a Yogyakarta warung while a gamelan orchestra tunes up next door. Indonesia moves to Islamic calls to prayer, Hindu offerings left daily on doorsteps, and volcanic geology that keeps the whole place both fertile and faintly dangerous. I’ve never left with the sense of having finished it.
Chapter One
Bali beyond the beach
I spent a week based in Ubud without touching sand once, and didn’t miss it. The Tegallalang rice terraces, stepped impossibly steep down a green hillside, are best seen at seven in the morning before the tour buses arrive. Tirta Empul’s holy spring temple still functions as an active purification site — locals and visitors alike queue in sarongs to stand under the stone spouts — and I found it more moving than any museum. In the evenings, Ubud’s palace courtyard hosts Legong dance performances, gamelan and gold headdresses under string lights, ticket prices that would embarrass a Western theatre. Drive an hour north and Mount Batur’s sunrise trek rewards a 3am wake-up with a crater view over cloud.
“Indonesia doesn’t hold still long enough to be summarised, and I’ve made peace with never finishing it.”
Chapter Two
East of the ordinary
Flores and Komodo National Park are where Indonesia stops being gentle and starts being wild. I watched Komodo dragons — genuinely enormous, unhurried, entirely capable of outrunning a person over short distances — patrol Rinca Island’s dry grassland, then snorkelled Pink Beach’s coral gardens an hour later, manta rays gliding beneath the boat. Kawah Ijen, on Java, demands a midnight hike to see its blue sulphuric flames, an eerie electric glow visible only in full darkness, followed by a sunrise view straight down into a turquoise crater lake. Sumba and Flores’ villages, further east still, keep animist traditions and ikat weaving alive with almost no concession to tourism at all.
The Short List
Do not miss in Indonesia
At a glance
Indonesia in numbers
- Capital
- Jakarta
- Language
- Indonesian
- Currency
- Indonesian rupiah
- Best time
- May to September, the dry season across most islands
Did you know
Indonesia sits on the Ring of Fire and contains more active volcanoes than any other country in the world.