Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Jakarta
Population: 284 million+
Language: Bahasa Indonesia (over 700 living languages are spoken across the country).
1 – Borobudur Temple (also above)
Borobudur in central Java, the world’s largest Buddhist monument, was built by the Sailendra dynasty in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, nine stacked platforms, six square and three circular, carrying 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues, 72 of them seated inside perforated stupas.
Borobudur was later abandoned, for reasons that remain unclear, until Raffles sent the Dutch engineer Cornelius to survey it in 1814, and a major UNESCO-backed restoration was completed in 1983, with the temple listed as World Heritage in 1991.
Borobudur is meant to be walked, a pilgrim path of about 5 km climbing from the world of desire to the world of form and on to formlessness, and its hidden foot holds 160 relief panels, uncovered in 1885, photographed by Kassian Cephas in 1890–91 and covered again.
2 – Lake Toba
Lake Toba fills a vast caldera in the highlands of North Sumatra, the world’s largest volcanic lake, about 100 km long, 30 km wide and 505 m deep, with the island of Samosir rising in the middle.
Ferries cross Lake Toba from Parapat to Samosir in about an hour, where Batak villages of saddle-roofed houses line the shore and King Siallagan’s stone chairs at Ambarita mark where village meetings and trials were held.
Lake Toba’s caldera was formed by a super-eruption about 74,000 years ago, the largest of the last two million years and some 100 times larger than Tambora in 1815, though the theory that it pushed early humans to the brink is widely doubted, as sites in southern Africa show people living through it.
3 – Jakarta
Jakarta, on the northwest coast of Java, grew from the port of Sunda Kelapa, and in 1619 Jan Pieterszoon Coen captured Jayakarta, razed it and built Batavia, headquarters of the Dutch East India Company and seat of more than three centuries of Dutch control.
Jakarta’s old Batavia lies around Fatahillah Square in Kota Tua, while the Istiqlal Mosque, widely described as Southeast Asia’s largest, stands a stone’s throw from the Catholic cathedral, linked to it by an underground Tunnel of Friendship opened in 2024.
On 26 August 1811 Colonel Rollo Gillespie of Comber, County Down, led the assault at Meester Cornelis, the site of Jatinegara in east Jakarta, as the British took Java, and on 17 August 1945 Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesia’s independence in Jakarta.
4 – Prambanan Complex
Prambanan Complex, about 18 km east of Yogyakarta, is the largest Hindu temple complex in Indonesia, built around 850 and described in an inscription of 856, dedicated to the Trimurti, with the central Shiva temple rising 47 m among what were once 240 temples.
Three main temples at Prambanan face three smaller ones for the gods’ mounts, among them Shiva’s bull Nandi, the Shiva and Brahma temples carry the Ramayana in relief, and the Ramayana Ballet is staged at an open-air theatre beside them.
A major earthquake in the 16th century is thought to have brought down much of the abandoned Prambanan, and since reconstruction began in 1918 a temple is rebuilt only if at least 75% of its original stone survives, so most of the 240 temples remain in ruins.
5 – Sewu Temple Compound
Sewu Temple Compound, about 800 m north of Prambanan and part of the same UNESCO listing, is a Buddhist complex of nearly 250 shrines laid out as a mandala, begun in the late 8th century and enlarged in the 9th, several decades older than Prambanan.
An inscription dated 792 names Sewu Temple Compound as Manjusrigrha, the House of Manjusri, and pairs of guardian statues stand at each of its four entrances around a large central sanctuary.
Sewu means a thousand, after the legend of Rara Jonggrang, who set a prince to build a thousand temples in one night and tricked him into stopping at 999, so he turned her to stone, and many believe the Durga statue in Prambanan’s Shiva temple represents her.
6 – Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park
Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park in East Java centres on the 16 km-wide Tengger caldera, whose floor holds a sand sea about 10 km across, with Bromo, the youngest and only active cone on it, rising to 2,329 m, and behind it Semeru, Java’s highest mountain at 3,676 m.
Sunrise over the sand sea is the classic view at Bromo Tengger Semeru, from the caldera rim, before a walk across the sand to Bromo’s crater, while Semeru has been almost continuously active since 1967.
The Tenggerese of Bromo Tengger Semeru trace their traditions to legends of the Majapahit kingdom, and at the Yadnya Kasada festival offerings of fruit, vegetables, flowers and livestock are thrown into Bromo’s crater, while villagers perched on its slopes try to catch them with nets and sarongs.
7 – Bali
Bali, home to about 4.3 million people at the 2020 census, is the one part of Indonesia where nearly nine in ten people are Hindu, in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim, and Majapahit courtiers and priests are traditionally said to have withdrawn here as Islam spread across Java.
Bali’s subak system of canals, weirs and water temples, dating back to the 9th century, shares irrigation among farmers, and UNESCO listed the Cultural Landscape of Bali Province in 2012 as an expression of the Tri Hita Karana philosophy.
Japanese forces landed on Bali on 18 February 1942, and in the Badung Strait on the night of 19–20 February a smaller Japanese force held off an Allied squadron, sinking the Dutch destroyer Piet Hein.
8 – Uluwatu Temple
Uluwatu Temple stands about 70 m above the Indian Ocean at Bali’s south-western tip, said to have been founded in the 11th century by the sage Mpu Kuturan and enlarged by the 16th-century priest Dang Hyang Nirartha, who legend says attained moksha here.
The inner courtyards of Uluwatu Temple are closed to visitors, so the draw is the clifftop path above the ocean, as well as the kecak dance performed here at sunset.
The long-tailed macaques at Uluwatu Temple grab glasses, phones or hats, then hold out for more or better food before handing them back, and researchers have found the habit is learned and passed between generations.
9 – Komodo National Park
Komodo National Park takes in three main islands, Komodo, Rinca and Padar, with more than 20 smaller ones between Sumbawa and Flores, declared a national park in 1980 and listed by UNESCO in 1991 to protect the Komodo dragon, the largest living lizard.
Only a few thousand Komodo dragons survive, fewer than 1,400 of them adults, found only on Komodo, Rinca, Flores and a few small islands nearby, while the waters of Komodo National Park are rich in manta rays and swept by strong currents.
A 2009 study led by Bryan Fry, then at the University of Melbourne, found venom glands along the Komodo dragon’s jaw that stop blood clotting and make blood pressure collapse, and a 2013 study found only ordinary bacteria in its mouth, ending the old theory that it killed by infection.
10 – Tanjung Puting
Tanjung Puting in Central Kalimantan covers more than 3,000 km² of peat swamp, heath forest and mangrove, protected since the 1930s and declared a national park in 1982, one of the best places to see orangutans, which live in the wild only on Borneo and Sumatra.
Boats work up the Sekonyer River through Tanjung Puting to Camp Leakey, past proboscis monkeys and hornbills in the trees along the banks.
Camp Leakey was founded in 1971 by Biruté Galdikas, one of the three women Louis Leakey sent to study the great apes, with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and she devoted more than fifty years to the orangutans of Tanjung Puting, until her death in 2026.
11 – Tana Toraja
Tana Toraja is a highland region of South Sulawesi, far to the north of Makassar, reached by Dutch colonial rule only in the early 1900s, which helped its distinctive traditions around death to survive.
Tana Toraja’s villages are built of tongkonan, ancestral houses with great saddle-shaped roofs, some hung with buffalo horns, and at Lemo and Londa the dead lie in graves cut into cliffs, watched over by tau-tau, life-size wooden effigies on rock balconies.
A Toraja funeral can come months or years after a death, and until then the body stays at home, spoken of as to makula’, a sick person, and given food, while the number of buffalo sacrificed at the funeral marks the family’s standing.
12 – Raja Ampat
Raja Ampat is an archipelago of more than 1,500 islands, cays and shoals off the north-western tip of New Guinea’s Bird’s Head Peninsula, in the heart of the Coral Triangle, and its name, the Four Kings, refers to Waigeo, Batanta, Salawati and Misool.
Wayag in Raja Ampat’s far north is a maze of mushroom-shaped limestone islets, and off Wai Island divers can see a US P-47 Thunderbolt, one of several that ditched there on 21 October 1944 when they ran short of fuel.
More than 550 species of hard coral have been recorded in Raja Ampat, around 70% of all those known, and villages practise sasi, a customary system of seasonal fishing closures, alongside no-take zones agreed by customary leaders.