Discover Indonesia

A Medan institution since the 1920s, Tip Top recalls the heyday of the Dutch colonial period! Today no visit to the city is complete without sampling its legendary ‘Moorkop ice cream’, served with ‘bitter ballen’ and chocolate sauce!

Stronghold of the critically endangered Sumatran tiger, Sumatran rhinoceros, Asian elephant and orangutan, Gunung Leuser National Park protects an area of prime wilderness in the north of the island. Our preferred base for visits is the remote settlement of Tangkahan, where the ground-breaking Conservation Response Unit (CRU) has set up a camp to promote sustainable tourism and protect the region, using domesticated Sumatran elephants on patrols. You’ll arrive in time for an ellie trek and tubing cruise on the river.

Today you’ll be taken on a guided walk to see wild and semi-wild orangutans in the forest around your camp. Although the Swiss-run rescue and rehab centre that began the excellent conservation work here is now closed the great work they established ensures sightings are virtually guaranteed thanks to the presence of a feeding platform where fruit is left every day to help released apes. You may also see white and black gibbons, Thomas leaf monkeys and macaques as well as numerous reptiles and birds, including hornbills. Tigers and rhinos have also been spotted in this area, although encounters are extremely rare. Accommodation is in a basic, but clean and atmospheric forest lodge.

Connected to the shore via a narrow isthmus of land, the presque-île in the centre of volcanic Lake Toba, Samosir, is the homeland of the Toba Batak – a community of Christian-ized indigenous people. Dotted along the island’s tropical shoreline are a string of delightful little resorts, most of them approached by ferry, that make ideal bases for leisurely loops by cycle or on foot through the forested hinterland.

While the Christian missionaries who converted the Toba Batak a century ago erased many local traditions (including head hunting!), lots of houses retain antique-style upswept eaves and handsomely sculpted gables. Wood carving remains a local speciality – staffs depicting the faces of ancestral spirits are a staple of village handicraft shops – as does stone sculpture, music, dance and weaving.

Yogyakarta is Java’s culture capital, and the place to experience traditional gamelan, shadow puppetry, classical and contemporary Javanese dance and ritual theatre – all of which you will have the chance to see between trips to the ancient wonders in the countryside around the city.

Borobudur encapsulates everything that’s most exotic about Java. At sunset you can watch the warm evening light illuminating the faces of 1200-year old stone Buddhas, which gaze over a plateau of lush rice fields and palm groves to the plume of smoke rising from the summit of Gunung Merapi. Ash from the volcanoes on the western horizon buried the mighty stupa until the early 19th century, when British and Dutch officials re-discovered the site.

Dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, the UNESCO-listed Prambanan complex centres on an elaborately carved, 47-metre-tall sanctuary tower, surrounded by over 200 subsidiary shrines, all of them richly decorated. The spectacle of this extraordinary behemoth soaring above the palm canopy, swathed in smoke from village fires, ranks among the most memorable Southeast Asia has to offer.

Back in Yogya, don’t miss the beautiful Water Palace and Sonobudoyo Museum, where the highlight is a collection of 1,200 wavey-bladed kris daggers.

In the company of your guide, visit the warrenous Arab Quarter, or kampong Arab, around the city’s oldest and most revered mosque, the Mesjid Ampel, stopping for a spiced coffee and samosa in a local café before heading into the Pabean Market district – a photographer’s dream. Time permitting, you could then venture uptown to the atmospheric Kalimas Harbour, a port filled with old-style, blue-and-white, wood-built schooners, or pinisi, loading and un-loading cargoes of produce.

Peaking at 2,392m (7,848ft), Gunung Bromo in eastern Java may not be Indonesia’s highest volcano, but it’s one of the most conveniently accessible, with a road running all the way up to the lip of the caldera’s encircling cliff, from where the views are magnificent. Bromo is actually one of three volcanoes cradled in a massive 10-kilometre crater that’s carpeted in a covering of grey-brown sand and ash. Rising in the background, a plume of smoke and steam billows from the perfectly symmetrical snout of Gunung Semeru, Java’s loftiest peak (3,676m / 12,000ft).

The beautiful Ijen Plateau is studded with dramatic volcanoes. The one that’s most interesting to ascend on foot is Gunung Ijen (1,994m), whose summit crater cradles a steaming blue-green lake, surrounded by slopes of yellow-ochre. The path up to it, which takes an hour-and-a-half to ascend, is trodden at dawn each day by teams of sulphur miners from the local villages. Having hacked lumps of mineral-rich rock from the crater floor, the men return carrying 50–70kg loads on their backs – an extraordinary feat of courage and endurance which you can observe from the safety of the crater rim.