Indonesia Travel

The dry, undulating island of Sumba has the richest tribal culture in Nusa Tenggara, centred on a religious tradition called marapu. It’s one of the poorest but most fascinating islands to visit, with a decidedly off-the-beaten-track appeal courtesy of its thatched clan houses, colossal carved megalith tombs, outstanding hand-spun ikat and bloody sacrificial funerals.

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Imagine yourself a little hairier and better with your toes and you’ve got Bukit Lawang’s main attraction: the orang-utan.

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Anchored tenuously in the deep Indian Ocean, this giant island is still as wild and unpredictable as the Victorian-era jungle-seekers dreamed. Millennia of chaos erupting from the earth’s toxic core or from the fierce ocean waves create and destroy in equal measure. When the earth and sea remain still, the past’s death and destruction fertilise a verdant future. The rugged mountains and fertile valleys are fed by near-constant rains, colouring the jungles of the Mentawai Islands and the rice terraces of Bukittinggi many shades of green.

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Like Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Bagan in Myanmar, Java’s Borobudur makes the rest of Southeast Asia’s spectacular sites seem almost incidental. Looming out of a patchwork of bottle-green paddies and swaying palm tops, this colossal Buddhist relic is one of Southeast Asia’s marvels, surviving Gunung Merapi’s ash flows, terrorist bombs, and the wear and tear of a million pairs of tourist flip-flops (thongs) to remain as enigmatic and beautiful as it must have been 1200 years ago.

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If Jakarta is Java’s financial and industrial powerhouse, Yogyakarta is its soul. Central to the island’s artistic and intellectual heritage, Yogyakarta (pronounced ‘Jogjakarta’), called Yogya for short, is where the Javanese language is at its purest, Java’s arts at their brightest and its traditions at their most visible.

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The first thing everyone notices about Sulawesi is its strange shape. There must have been some serious tectonic action in this region to produce an island so bizarre. But bizarre is beautiful and in its contortions are its character, with an incredible diversity of people, cultures and landscapes spread across its length and breadth. Great seafarers like the Minahasans and the Bugis helped to shape modern Indonesia as they took to the seas in trade and conflict, but it is the land-locked cultures of the island that are most mysterious. Tana Toraja is spellbinding, home to a proud people hemmed in by magnificent mountains on all sides. The scenery of volcanoes and rice fields is stunning. However, the Toraja’s elaborate death rituals are something else. Cave graves, tau tau (carved wooden effigies of the dead), a buffalo cult, houses shaped like boats and the dead treated like the living – a visit here is out of this world.

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‘A romantic little village’ is how Sir Stamford Raffles described Bogor when he made it his country home during the British interregnum. As an oasis of unpredictable European weather – it is credited with 322 thunderstorms a year – cool, quiet Bogor was long the chosen retreat of starch-collared colonials escaping the stifling and crowded capital.

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West Timor has never been much of a tourist destination, although it is very scenic, with rugged countryside and traditional villages that are well worth exploring. The combination of Indonesia’s recent crises, visa restrictions, East Timor’s harrowing struggle for independence and transport issues all but wiped West Timor from the tourism map for many years. But with twice-weekly Kupang–Darwin connections now back in operation and the proximity of East Timor offering an inexpensive visa run, visitor numbers are slowly increasing again.

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Solo, a traditional and unhurried city 65km northeast of Yogyakarta, often plays second fiddle to its more conspicuous neighbour. But this is just plain unfair. With its backstreet kampung, wide thoroughfares, laid-back locals and rich cultural heritage, Solo has more than enough to warrant at least an overnight visit. Plus the usual cries of ‘Hello mister’, ‘Becak, becak’ and ‘Come to my gallery’ – so ingrained in many of Java’s cities – are less frequent here, as are the tourists; more often than not you won’t bump into another traveller as you wander the alleyways and markets of this attractive city.

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Bima and Raba together form the major town in the eastern half of Sumbawa. Bima, Sumbawa’s chief port, is a grubby run-down place that becomes mud-bound in the wet season and frazzled in the dry. You’ll want to get out sharpish. Raba, a few kilometres east, is the much more orderly but dull administrative centre.

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