Indonesia

Indonesia straddles the Equator, sandwiched between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It shares land boundaries with Malaysia to the north, East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the east, Australia to the south, Palau, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand to the north, and India to the northwest. Indonesia is the world’s biggest archipelago, with 17,504 islands, 6,000 of which are inhabited. This nation has a population of about 240 million people, making it the fourth most populated in the world. Wayang kulit shadow puppetry, in which highly sculpted cutouts act out scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana and other popular folk legends, and its accompaniment, the gamelan music, is the most uniquely “Indonesian” arts. You’ll sense the unexpected surge of warm, damp air as soon as you get off the plane. Indonesia is a tropical country. There are no springs, summers, autumns, or winters; instead, there are only two seasons: rainy and dry, all of which are relative. Indonesia has the most active volcanoes of any country, with 167 active volcanoes. The Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park and the Ijen Crater in East Java, Mount Rinjani in Lombok, and maybe simplest of all, Mount Batur in Bali are some of the more accessible for visitors. Indonesia is home to some of the world’s greatest surviving swaths of tropical forest. Borobudur, the world’s greatest Buddhist monument, is from the eighth century, whereas Prambanan, a neighboring Hindu monument, dates from only a few years later.