Indonesia

Indonesia is the largest archipelagic state on Earth: roughly 17,000 islands spread across 5,100 km of ocean — the same distance as London to Tehran and back — with about 285 million people, making it the fourth most populous country in the world after India, China and the United States. Its land area is around 1.9 million km², about twenty-four times Czechia.

Four superlatives are worth having straight before anything else. It has more active volcanoes than any country — around 130. It has the largest Muslim population of any nation, roughly 240 million, while being a secular republic rather than an Islamic state. It sits on the most seismically violent stretch of the Ring of Fire, which has produced the largest eruption and one of the deadliest tsunamis in recorded history. And it holds the greatest marine biodiversity on the planet, in the reefs of Raja Ampat.

The distribution of all those people is the fact that explains most of the rest. Java holds around 56% of the population on about 7% of the land — some 150 million people on an island roughly the size of England — which makes it one of the most densely populated large islands anywhere. Papua, at the other end, is nearly as large and holds under 2%.

And the country is currently doing something no other large state is doing: moving its capital. Jakarta is sinking — parts of the north by as much as 25 cm a year, with about 40% of the city already below sea level — so a new capital called Nusantara is being built in the forest of East Kalimantan on Borneo. The first phase was inaugurated in 2024. Whether it will actually work is one of the more interesting open questions in world urbanism.

The name Indonesia is a nineteenth-century European coinage — Greek Indos plus nesos, island, so "Indian islands" — invented by an English ethnographer in the 1850s and adopted by nationalist students in the 1920s precisely because it was not the Dutch "Netherlands Indies". A country named itself with a word made up by outsiders, and made it mean something else.

The language decision was more remarkable. When the nationalist movement met at the Youth Pledge of 1928, it needed one language for a territory speaking around 700. The obvious choice was Javanese, the mother tongue of the largest group by far, with a great literature and a thousand-year history. They chose instead Malay — the trade lingua franca of the archipelago's ports, the first language of only a small minority — renamed it Bahasa Indonesia, and made it the national language.

The exact number is genuinely disputed and the reason is instructive: it depends on what counts as an island, and on the tide. The figure of 17,508 was the long-standing official one; a national survey using satellite mapping produced a rather lower verified count, and Indonesia has been formally registering names with the United Nations to lock the number down. Somewhere around 17,000 is the honest answer, of which perhaps 6,000 are inhabited.

Indonesia sits where the Indo-Australian plate dives under the Eurasian, and the result is a 7,000 km volcanic arc with around 130 active volcanoes — more than any other country, and roughly a sixth of the world's total. It also means the country has produced two of the largest eruptions in human history and remains one of the most seismically dangerous places to live anywhere.

The other consequence is tsunami. On 26 December 2004 a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra — the third largest ever recorded — generated waves that killed around 230,000 people across fourteen countries, of whom roughly 170,000 died in Aceh alone. It is the deadliest tsunami in history. It also, unexpectedly, ended a thirty-year separatist war: the devastation forced the Free Aceh Movement and the government into the Helsinki peace agreement of 2005, which has held.

Sail east from Bali to Lombok — a strait about 35 km wide — and the animals change. On the Bali side you find tigers (historically), monkeys, woodpeckers, barbets: Asian fauna. On the Lombok side you find cockatoos, honeyeaters, marsupials: Australasian fauna. The strait is deep and stayed open even at the lowest ice-age sea levels, so the two faunas never mixed.

This is the Wallace Line, identified by Alfred Russel Wallace during eight years of collecting across the archipelago from 1854. It is one of biogeography's foundational observations. And while on the island of Ternate in the Maluku in 1858, feverish with malaria, Wallace worked out the mechanism of evolution by natural selection independently, wrote it up, and posted it to Charles Darwin — who had been sitting on the same idea for twenty years and was prompted into finally publishing. The joint paper of 1858 and On the Origin of Species the following year both come out of a letter sent from Indonesia.

Indonesia straddles the equator between roughly 6° north and 11° south, and runs from 95° to 141° east — from just off the tip of Malaysia to the border with Papua New Guinea. It borders three countries by land (Malaysia on Borneo, Papua New Guinea, and Timor-Leste) and shares maritime boundaries with ten more.

Long before there was an Indonesia there were two great archipelagic states, and modern Indonesian nationalism treats both as ancestors. Neither was a country in the modern sense: they were mandalas, networks of ports and vassals held by trade, marriage and prestige rather than by borders.

Indonesia has the largest Muslim population of any country on Earth, and — unusually — it was not conquered into it. There was no invading Muslim army. Islam arrived along the same trade routes as everything else, carried by Gujarati, Persian and Arab merchants from around the thirteenth century, and spread over three hundred years through ports, marriages, courts and Sufi teaching.

For most of recorded history, nutmeg, mace and cloves grew in exactly one place on Earth: a handful of tiny volcanic islands in the Maluku, of which the nutmeg group — the Banda Islands — amounts to about 60 km² in total. In medieval Europe those spices sold for many times their weight in gold, and nobody in Europe knew where they came from. Finding out was, quite literally, the point of the age of exploration.

The Portuguese got there in 1512. The Dutch arrived at the end of the century, and in 1602 merged their competing companies into the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie — the VOC — which was the first company in history to issue tradeable shares to the public, and which was granted by the Dutch state the right to raise armies, wage war, execute prisoners and sign treaties. It was less a business than a privatised empire.

What followed the VOC was a colonial state, and it was extractive in a very specific and well-documented way. The Cultuurstelsel — the Cultivation System, imposed from 1830 — required Javanese peasants to give up a fifth of their land and a fifth of their labour to grow export crops for the government: coffee, sugar, indigo, tea.

It was enormously profitable. At its height the colony supplied something in the region of a third of the Dutch state's revenue, paid off the Netherlands' national debt and financed its railways. It also produced famines in Java in the 1840s, because land and labour that had grown rice were growing indigo instead. The system was described from the inside in the 1860 novel Max Havelaar, written under the pen name Multatuli by a former colonial official, which caused a genuine scandal in the Netherlands and is one of the few colonial-era books still worth reading whole.

Japan invaded in 1942 and the Dutch colonial army collapsed in under three months — a humiliation that permanently destroyed the myth of European invincibility in Asia. The occupation was harsh: forced labour (romusha) killed hundreds of thousands, and famine in Java killed more. But the Japanese also, for their own purposes, promoted Indonesian nationalists, trained Indonesian militias and banned Dutch — all of which turned out to matter enormously.

Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. On 17 August, two days later and before the Allies could return, Sukarno read a proclamation of independence three sentences long from the front steps of his house in Jakarta, with Mohammad Hatta beside him. The republic dates itself from that morning.

On the night of 30 September 1965 a group of officers killed six generals in Jakarta in what was presented as a pre-emptive coup. Within hours General Suharto, who was not on the list, had taken control of the army's response. Within weeks the Indonesian Communist Party — the PKI, then the third largest in the world with perhaps three million members — was blamed, banned and destroyed.

What followed was one of the largest mass killings of the twentieth century. Between late 1965 and mid-1966, somewhere between 500,000 and over a million people were killed across Java, Bali, Sumatra and elsewhere — party members, suspected sympathisers, trade unionists, teachers, ethnic Chinese, and a great many people denounced in local disputes that had nothing to do with politics. It was organised by the army and carried out substantially by civilian militias, including religious youth organisations. Around a million more were imprisoned without trial, some for over a decade.

The transition after 1998 — Reformasi — is one of the more successful democratisations anywhere, and it is under-reported because it was undramatic. Within six years Indonesia had a free press, competitive elections, term limits, an elected upper house, the army out of parliament, and a radical decentralisation that pushed money and authority down to nearly 500 districts. It is now the world's third-largest democracy by electorate, and it runs the largest single-day election on Earth — over 200 million voters, all voting on one day, counted by hand.

Around 285 million people and something like 1,300 recognised ethnic groups. The Javanese are about 40%, the Sundanese of West Java about 15%, and then a very long tail: Batak, Minangkabau, Betawi, Bugis, Balinese, Madurese, Acehnese, Dayak, Papuan peoples, and hundreds more. Around 700 living languages are spoken — second only to Papua New Guinea — and most Indonesians are bilingual in their regional language and Indonesian from childhood.

Bali is one island out of seventeen thousand, holds about 1.5% of Indonesia's population, and accounts for the overwhelming majority of what foreigners know about the country. It is also genuinely unlike the rest of it, and the reason is that it is Hindu — the last redoubt of the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist world that Islam otherwise absorbed.

Indonesia holds the third-largest area of tropical rainforest in the world after Brazil and the Congo basin, and for two decades it was destroying it faster than almost anywhere. That is the reputation. The current picture is more complicated and — unusually for environmental news — partly better.

Indonesia is one of the world's seventeen megadiverse countries and probably the richest of them: it has around 12% of the world's mammal species, 16% of its reptiles and amphibians, and 17% of its birds, on 1.3% of its land area. It also has more threatened species than almost anywhere, for the same reasons.

There is no such thing as "Indonesian food" in the way there is Italian or Japanese food. There are several dozen distinct regional cuisines that happen to share a country, a staple and a chilli habit. What they have in common is rice — nasi, which in Indonesian is close to a synonym for "a meal" — and sambal, of which there are hundreds of local varieties and which is not optional.

Two further things worth ordering: babi guling, Balinese spit-roast suckling pig with a spice paste rubbed into the cavity — Bali being one of the few places in Indonesia where pork is on the menu — and martabak, either the savoury folded egg-and-mince pancake or the astonishing sweet version, a thick pancake split and filled with chocolate, cheese, condensed milk and peanuts, sold from carts after dark.

Java is where Indonesia's history, politics and 150 million of its people are. It is also, for a visitor, the most rewarding island in the country and the one most often skipped in favour of Bali. Two weeks on Java with a train pass is one of the better trips available in Asia.

Bali receives something like six million foreign visitors a year on an island of 5,800 km² — roughly the area of the Central Bohemian Region — and the strain shows in the south. It is also still, away from that strip, one of the most beautiful and culturally intact places in Asia. Both statements are true and the trick is knowing which part you are in.

The sixth largest island in the world, wilder than Java, less visited than Bali, and the place to go for rainforest and volcanoes rather than temples and beaches. It is also large — 1,700 km end to end — and the overland journey is slow, so pick a region.

East of Bali the islands get drier, poorer, more Christian and far less visited, and the diving gets better. Flores and Komodo are the accessible end of this and are the standard second stop after Bali.

The eastern half of the country holds most of its strangeness and almost none of its visitors. Getting around takes longer, costs more and requires more planning, and it is where Indonesia stops feeling like anywhere else.

There is no way to see Indonesia by land. The country is 5,100 km wide, most of it is water, and the internal logistics are the single biggest constraint on any itinerary.

There is no direct flight from Prague to Indonesia and there never has been. Everyone connects, and the sensible question is only which hub and how many hours in it.

Indonesia is cheap — genuinely cheap outside the resort strip of southern Bali, where prices in some places now match southern Europe. The gap between what a trip costs in Ubud and what the same trip costs in Sumatra is larger than most first-time visitors expect.

The natural hazards, in proportion. Volcanic eruptions are frequent and the exclusion zones set by PVMBG (the volcanology agency) are enforced and correct — several tourists have died ignoring them, most notably on Marapi in 2023. Earthquakes are constant and mostly harmless; the serious ones bring tsunamis, and the rule on any Indonesian coast is that if the ground shakes hard enough that standing is difficult, walk inland and uphill immediately without waiting for a warning. Rip currents on the south-facing beaches of Bali and Java are strong and drown swimmers every year — swim between the flags where there are lifeguards, and nowhere else.

For Czech travellers: the Czech Embassy in Jakarta (Jalan Gereja Theresia 20, Menteng) covers the whole country, with honorary consuls including one in Denpasar, Bali. Note the contacts from mzv.cz before you go — from Flores or Sulawesi the embassy is a long way away, and a lost passport means a flight to Jakarta. MZV ČR maintains standing advice for Papua and Aceh; registration in DROZD is free and genuinely useful in a country with this much seismic and volcanic activity.

Indonesia is the largest country most people cannot describe. It has the fourth largest population on Earth, an economy in the world's top twenty, the largest Muslim population of any nation, and a functioning democracy built out of a dictatorship within living memory — and in the European imagination it is a beach in Bali and possibly a dragon. That gap is not the country's fault, and closing it is genuinely rewarding, because almost everything on the other side of it is more interesting than the beach.

The single best decision a first-time visitor can make is to go somewhere other than southern Bali first. Land in Yogyakarta and take the trains across Java. Fly to Medan and go to Lake Toba. Go to Tana Toraja, or to the Bandas, and understand that the reason nobody around you is a tourist is that the tourists are all on one island 2,000 km away. Bali is worth seeing — the subak landscape and the temple culture are extraordinary and the north and east of the island are still quiet — but it is a much better second week than a first.

Two things on this page matter more than anything else and are worth repeating in plain terms. Do not rent a scooter unless you already ride one at home and hold the licence; it is the thing that actually injures and kills visitors, and your insurance will not pay. And do not drink spirits of unknown provenance, because methanol poisoning is a recurring, lethal and entirely avoidable Indonesian problem that the brochures do not mention.

On the images

This page is nearly imageless, and that is a storage problem rather than an editorial choice: the site's image store holds exactly one Indonesia photograph — the hero — where a country of this size would normally have fifteen or twenty. That one is a good one, and accurate: Borobudur's terraced stupas at dawn with a volcano behind, which is genuinely what the place looks like from the upper level at sunrise. The rest of the set was never generated or has been lost, and rather than pad the page with images of somewhere else, it goes out short. It will be filled in when the pictures exist.

The three recipe images come from a shared folder and each of them is wrong in a specific way, noted in the captions and repeated here. The nasi goreng is pale gold, where the dish is brown-red because of the kecap manis that defines it, and it is missing the fried egg that belongs on top. The rendang is sitting in sauce — that is kalio, the halfway stage; true rendang is cooked until the coconut milk has gone and the meat is dark and nearly dry. The satay has no peanut sauce poured over it and no lontong beside it, which is most of what makes it a meal rather than a skewer.