Indonesia: Travel Guide

The infinite archipelago: Indonesia is not just Bali

Indonesia is a universe composed of an infinity of islands: just to explore the most significant ones would take months, perhaps years, and continuous returns. It is an immense country, among the most populated in the world, and possesses a cultural, linguistic, and landscape stratification that is hard to find anywhere else.

One thing I always repeat is this: Indonesia is not Bali. Bali is only a gateway, the most famous and probably the most talked about, but the archipelago goes far beyond that island. Those who stop exclusively there risk taking home a very partial idea of a complex and profoundly varied world.

With over seventeen thousand islands, many shaped by the breath of volcanoes, Indonesia constantly changes its face. Some areas are difficult to reach and require patience when moving around. Traveling here means accepting a different rhythm, definitely a slow one.

I haven’t explored the entire archipelago, but I have traveled across Sumatra, Java, and Bali, trying to listen to the differences that separate and at the same time unite these lands.

Sumatra in the haze and the refuge of Canggu

Bali remains the most well-known island. Its culture is something profoundly unique in the world, an intertwining of spirituality, art, and daily life that permeates every corner of the island. I also spent some time in Canggu, living for a month near the beach and the ocean to put my thoughts and steps back together, letting time slow down enough to allow things to fall back into place.

But the wonders of Indonesia don’t end there.

I remember a trip across Sumatra, from south to north, during a period when oil palm fields were being burned. For days, the air hung suspended in a cloud of smoke that made it difficult to see the horizon. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was part of the reality of that territory and showed me a harsher side of traveling.

And then there are the people. In Indonesia, a smile is almost a spontaneous language. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be stopped on the street by groups of people asking to take a picture together. It was never just a photo: shortly after, the questions, the laughter, and the small conversations born without formality would begin, as often happens in places where hospitality is still a natural gesture.

Jakarta: legendary traffic and genuine hospitality

Jakarta showed me another face of the country. The city’s legendary traffic is not a myth: it is a physical, slow, suffocating experience, made of hours spent almost motionless inside an urban flow that never seems to want to start again.

I fondly remember a Couchsurfing experience in a suburban neighborhood of the capital, hosted by a local girl. It was an area far from the tourist circuits; walking there meant stepping right into the daily life of the community: children playing along the street, small shops open without any rush, people sitting outside their houses talking in the late afternoon. There was nothing attractive in a touristy sense, yet that very normality seemed to me one of the most precious parts of the trip. Just being inside the day of those people, observing and sharing a fragment of their existence, made me realise how often the real journey happens far from the most talked-about places.

Indonesia is immense, stratified, complex. The more I travel through it, the more I discover how religion, art, daily life, and landscape intertwine without ever completely dissolving into one another.