Like a string of jewels in a coral sea, the 13,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago stretch almost 5000 km 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 were luring European navigators from the other side of the world in search of cloves, nutmeg and mace, once so rare and expensive that bloody wars were fought for control of their production and trade. The Dutch rule for almost 350 years, drawing their fortunes from the islands whose rich volcanic soil could produce two crops of rice a ear, as well as commercially valuable crops like coffee, sugar, tobacco and teak.
Endowed with a phenomenal array of natural resources and strange cultures, Indonesia because a magnet for every shade of entrepreneur from the west – a stamping ground for proselytizing missionaries, unscrupulous traders, wayward adventures, inspired artists. It has been overrun by Dutch and Japanese armies; surveyed, drilled, dug up and shipped off by foreign mining companies; littered end to end with the ‘transmigrants’ of Java and Bali; poked and prodded by ethnologists, linguists and anthropologists turning fading cultures into PhD theses.
But one group which Indonesia has never really attracted is the tourist. With the exception of Bali, Toraja land, and the huge Hindu-Buddhist monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan in central Java, all of which attract huge numbers of visitors, the islands of western Indonesia are often seen as places to pass through on the way down to Australia or on the way up to the Asian mainland – rather than as destinations in their own right – whilst the outer islands are considered too expensive to reach or too difficult or time-consuming to travel in. Both views are out-of-date. Travel in some parts of the outer islands can still be tedious, but over the last few years things have improved considerably; there are more roads and more buses, more ferry, shipping and air connections between the islands, and the rather neglected tourist industry is finally being given a significant push by the government Indonesia – making it easier to travel there than ever before.
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 the Kapuas River in Kalimantan; standing on the summit of Keli Mutu in Flores and gazing at the colored lakes that fill its volcanic craters; the lumbering leather-skinned dragons of Komodo Island; expatriates in Yogyakarta using an Asian language – Bahasa Indonesia – as the common means of communication; the funeral ceremonies of the Torajas in the highlands of central Sulawesi; the Dani tribesmen of Irian Jaya (now Papua) wearing little else but feathers and penis gourds; the wooden wayang golek puppets manipulated into life by the puppet-master of Yogyakarta; the brilliant coral reefs off the north coast of Sulawesi.
You can lie on your back on Kuta Beach in Bali and soak up the ultra-violet rays, paddle a canoe down the rivers of Kalimantan, surf at the island of Nias off the coast of Sumatera, trek in the high country of Irian Jaya (Papua), catch butterflies the size of your hand in central Sulawesi, eat your way through a kaleidoscope of fruit from one end of the archipelago to the other, stare down the craters of live volcanoes, learn the art of batik in Yogyakarta or the techniques of kite-making from any Indonesian kid – almost anything you want, Indonesia has got!
