15 Best Places to Visit in Indonesia

Ubud

Where the day starts with a broom sweeping petals off stone

My flight landed at half past five in the morning and Made was already waiting past the arrivals gate with a cigarette half smoked and a scooter helmet swinging from his wrist. We did not go to a hotel first. He took me straight to his aunt's warung near Jalan Hanoman, where a woman twice my age was already frying tempeh in a wok blackened from decades of use, and we ate nasi campur standing at the counter while the street outside was still mostly dark.

The homestay he had arranged for me was not one of Ubud's boutique villas with an infinity pool. It was a family compound behind a carved gate, two guest rooms built around a courtyard where the owner's mother still prepared canang sari offerings every morning before anyone else was awake. Eighteen dollars a night included breakfast, and included, unspoken, being folded into the rhythm of somebody else's household for four days.

On the second morning Made walked me to a pura he asked me not to name in writing, and we arrived to find a boy of maybe twelve rehearsing the Baris dance alone in the courtyard, sword raised, eyes locked into that fixed theatrical stare the dance demands. Made told me the stare has its own name, seledet, a quick flick of the eyes trained for years before it looks effortless. The boy's grandfather sat on the temple steps watching, since he was also the boy's first teacher, and nobody around us was filming for anything.

Baris in its original form is a solo warrior dance for one male dancer, though most resort stages now perform a group version built for a fifty minute dinner show. If the older solo form matters to you, Made said the honest way to find it is to ask at a village banjar office directly, not a hotel concierge desk, since that is where rehearsal schedules actually live rather than tourist listings.

We spent that afternoon the way most of my Ubud days went after that, wandering into whichever workshop had its doors open, watching a woodcarver in Mas village shape a garuda wing from a single block of suar wood, then getting steered by Made's cousin into a batik studio where the smell of hot wax and dye hung so thick it stayed in my shirt for two washes. Lunch was often whatever stall had the shortest line of locals rather than the longest line of tourists, since Made judged a warung by who was eating there, not by its Google rating.

Shopping in Ubud, done properly, happens away from the main tourist strip. Made took me to the Sukawati art market at dawn, before the tour buses arrive, where wholesale prices for sarongs, small wood carvings, and silver jewelry run noticeably lower than the shops closer to the palace, provided you bargain in Indonesian rather than English, since the asking price often quietly drops the moment you switch languages.

We do not travel to escape our home, Made said one evening over a plate of babi guling bought from a stall that only opens after four in the afternoon and sells out within two hours. We travel so the home has something new to talk about when we return.

That line stayed with me longer than any waterfall photograph from that trip, mostly because I watched him live it, greeting three separate strangers as old friends over the course of one dinner, each one apparently met on some earlier errand exactly like this one. Ubud was only the opening chapter of Bali for me, and I have written separately and in more depth about the best places to visit across Bali and practical tips for traveling to Bali for anyone building a longer stay around this one island alone.

Nusa Penida

A short crossing that felt longer than the flight in

Made's cousin runs a small boat charter out of Sanur, and on my fifth morning he put me on the seven o'clock fast boat to Nusa Penida instead of a day tour bus, since he said the day tours cram four viewpoints into six hours and leave no time to actually sit anywhere. The crossing takes about forty five minutes and gets genuinely rough past the halfway point, enough that the crew hands out plastic bags before boarding rather than after someone asks.

We rented a scooter from a stall by the harbor rather than booking a driver, since Made's cousin insisted the cliff roads to Kelingking and Angel's Billabong are manageable on two wheels if you go slowly and avoid the midday tour bus traffic jams that back up for nearly a kilometer by early afternoon. Kelingking's viewpoint lived up to every photograph I had seen, but what nobody had told me was that the actual descent to the beach below takes close to forty minutes each way on a slope steep enough that most visitors turn back halfway.

We ate lunch at a warung with plastic chairs and no menu beyond what the owner had cooked that morning, ikan bakar with a sambal matah so sharp it made my eyes water, for a price lower than a single bottled drink would have cost at the cafes closer to the viewpoints. Made's cousin's rule for the whole island was simple, eat wherever the motorbike taxi drivers eat, since they know exactly where the food is both good and honestly priced. Nusa Penida also sits close to some of Bali's better dive spots, and I go into that side of the island properly in a separate piece on Bali's best scuba diving sites by season, and for a broader look at what else the island offers beyond this one crossing, the best things to do in Bali covers the rest of what Made showed me over that first two weeks.

Manado

Clove smoke and grilled fish at an hour when Bali is still asleep

Ten days in, Made flew north with me to Manado, since he had a cousin there named Yosi and wanted me to see what he called the quiet Indonesia, the part that never trends. The flight runs through Jakarta or Makassar depending on the day and eats most of a working day door to door, and by the time we landed the smell of clove cigarettes and grilled fish had already replaced Bali's incense in the air.

Yosi met us at the airport with a plate of bubur Manado, a spiced rice porridge loaded with basil leaf and pumpkin, and insisted we eat it standing at a roadside stall before we had even found our hotel, since he said it tastes wrong once it has cooled on the drive. We stayed two nights at a small guesthouse near Wenang market that Yosi's sister manages, cheaper than anything listed on the booking apps because it is not listed on them at all.

We spent the first evening walking through Wenang market after dark, past stalls selling woku fish and dabu dabu chili, with Yosi occasionally stopping to argue prices with vendors he clearly already knew, more out of habit than need. He kept saying Manado was only the doorway, and that the real reason he had brought us north was three hours by boat away.

Sangihe Islands

An overnight ferry, a volcano that breathes, and a new year I stumbled into

Everyone with a dive certification talks about Bunaken near Manado, and it deserves the attention, but Yosi wanted us further out, to the Sangihe Islands, a volcanic chain that most travelers, even seasoned ones, have simply never heard mentioned. There are two ways there. A slow overnight ferry taking around eight hours to Tahuna, Sangihe's small capital, or a Wings Air turboprop that covers the same distance in about an hour.

We took the ferry, mostly because Yosi said the deck at sunrise, with Gunung Awu rising out of the sea mist, was worth the extra hours. Past midnight the engine dropped to a low hum and half the passengers, mostly clove farmers heading home with sacks of supplies, were already asleep on mats laid across the open deck. I did not sleep much myself, partly from the noise and partly from not wanting to miss the sunrise Yosi had promised.

We reached Tahuna by mid morning, checked into a basic hotel above a hardware shop that cost less than the airport taxi back in Manado, and spent the afternoon eating grilled tuna at a stall run by the hotel owner's brother in law, since in a town this size, it seemed like everyone eventually turned out to be somebody's relative.

The following day Yosi arranged a fishing boat rather than a dive charter, since there is barely any dive infrastructure this far out, to reach a small island called Mahengetang, south of Sangihe proper, where an active underwater volcano called Banua Wuhu sits shallow enough that snorkelers, not only certified divers, can watch bubbles of hot gas rising through cracks in the rock. The water near the vents runs noticeably warmer in patches, almost bath temperature, and the rock is stained yellow and orange from mineral deposits. Floating above it felt less like a dive site and more like standing beside something the earth had forgotten to finish building.

Yosi floated near me the whole time and, between breaths, told me some of the older fishermen here still say the vents are watched over by a spirit tied to this stretch of coast, and some still leave small offerings on the nearby rocks before fishing this water. He was careful to add that this is a story passed mouth to mouth between fishing families, not something written in any Sangir text he had personally read, and he did not want me presenting it as settled fact rather than local oral tradition.

We happened to arrive close to Tulude, the traditional Sangir new year and harvest thanksgiving festival held every January. It is not staged for visitors. It is a genuine community event with prayers, traditional dance, and a striking ritual where a tall layered cake called tamo, built from sticky rice, is ceremonially cut and shared among the whole village. Made, despite years of visiting Sulawesi for his own family reasons, admitted this was new to him too, standing next to me in the crowd looking just as unsure where to stand as I was.

On the way back through North Sulawesi we stopped near Bangka Island, close to Likupang, where a small community run watch group monitors sea turtle nesting beaches after dark. We joined a volunteer walking the sand in shifts, checking for fresh tracks and protecting nests from both natural predators and, more often, from disturbance by unaware visitors. We were shown, from a respectful distance, a nest marked off with bamboo stakes days earlier. No hatchlings emerged that particular night, only patience and mosquito bites, but the volunteer leading the watch spoke about the turtles the way some people talk about family members who travel often and return unpredictably.

Along parts of this coast, Yosi mentioned some older fishermen still tell a story that turtles carry the spirits of ancestors lost at sea, part of why a few communities treat harming one as a serious taboo well before any conservation law made it official, though again he was clear this varies from village to village and is oral tradition rather than documented text.

Kawah Ijen

Blue fire, sulfur baskets, and a smell that stays in your throat for days

Made rejoined me in Surabaya two weeks after Bali, having flown home briefly and then back out again, since he had never actually seen Kawah Ijen up close despite being Indonesian himself. He admitted somewhere on the drive from the airport that this leg had turned into as much of a discovery for him as for me.

We reached the Ijen car park a little after midnight and rented gas masks from a stall there for a small fee, since Made had read enough warnings by then to insist on it, despite plenty of other visitors around us climbing with nothing but a cotton scarf tied over their face. The hike up is roughly three kilometers of steady incline, manageable for most reasonably fit travelers, but the final stretch down into the crater itself is steep loose scree, thick with sulfur fumes that sting the throat even through a proper mask.

The blue flames are not lava. They are burning sulfuric gas escaping through cracks under pressure, only visible in complete darkness, which is why almost everyone climbs at night rather than for a daytime view. Miners were already at work when we arrived, carrying raw sulfur blocks down the mountain by hand in baskets balanced on bamboo poles, for a daily wage that Made translated for me in rupiah and then converted to dollars, and we both went quiet for a while after that.

We slept for a few hours afterward in a homestay in nearby Licin run by one of the miners' families, ate fried rice with a fried egg on top for breakfast at a table shared with two of the miners themselves, and Made spent most of that meal asking them questions I would never have known to ask, about shift lengths, about the cooperative that sets sulfur prices, about whether their sons planned to do the same work.

Mount Bromo

A crater that villagers still feed by hand once a year

From Ijen we crossed toward Mount Bromo, staying the night in a homestay in Cemoro Lawang run by a family Made had met through a friend of his gamelan students back in Bali. The father in that family still performs the Yadnya Kasada ceremony every year, when the local Tenggerese community throws offerings of rice, fruit, and livestock into the volcano's crater as thanks to the mountain spirits, a tradition tied to a much older legend about a princess and a promised sacrifice.

We had missed the ceremony season by a few months, but the family pulled out a photo album from the year before over dinner, hundreds of villagers descending into the Sea of Sand at dawn, some risking the crater edge to catch offerings thrown back down by others as a sign of good fortune. The mother of the house cooked us a simple meal of rawon that night, a dark beef soup flavored with keluak nut, since the mountain air had turned genuinely cold by evening and everyone wanted something warm.

Sunrise from Penanjakan viewpoint is the moment every Bromo photograph online tries to capture, and it earned the reputation honestly, even crowded with jeeps and tripods elbow to elbow along the railing. What surprised me more was renting a motorbike afterward and riding straight across the Sea of Sand alone except for a few horse handlers, Bromo's smoke trailing sideways in the wind, the whole landscape suddenly quiet again once the sunrise crowd had cleared out for breakfast.

Komodo and Rinca

A ranger's forked stick, a pink beach, and a boat that moved slower than we wanted

The last leg with Made took us to Labuan Bajo, gateway to Komodo National Park. Yosi's cousin from Manado had a friend running a small wooden phinisi boat, cheaper and slower than the speedboat tours sold in most agency windows along the harbor front, and we booked the two day version rather than the rushed single day loop most visitors choose, sleeping on deck mats under a tarp both nights.

Seeing a Komodo dragon on Rinca island up close, ambling past our path with that slow reptilian confidence, was less frightening than I expected and more strangely dignified. Our ranger guide, required by park rules and armed only with a forked wooden stick, mentioned along the trail that local Manggarai communities on Flores have long treated the dragons as distant kin rather than monsters, with older stories describing a human twin born alongside the first dragon.

Rinca generally holds a higher density of dragons than the more famous Komodo island itself, and the boat transfer from Labuan Bajo runs noticeably shorter, which our captain pointed out was exactly why he steered most short stay travelers there first. Padar island's pink tinged sand and layered viewpoint have become one of the most photographed spots in Indonesia, and we climbed it before seven in the morning on our captain's insistence, since the trail is fully exposed with no shade and unbearable by mid morning.

Dinner both nights was whatever the crew caught that afternoon, grilled and eaten cross legged on deck with rice and sambal passed around in a single shared bowl, the boat rocking gently at anchor in some cove whose name I never actually learned.

Bukit Lawang

A scar on an old orangutan's arm and a flood the village still calls the big water

Made could not join this stretch, so I traveled with Anto, Yosi's brother in law, a former trekking porter turned certified guide near Bukit Lawang in North Sumatra. Anto had grown up in the village bordering Gunung Leuser National Park and had known some of the semi wild orangutans there since he was a boy.

We stayed at a small guesthouse built right against the river, woken each morning by the sound of the current rather than an alarm, and ate every meal at the same family run warung where the owner's daughter had, by the second day, started bringing my coffee before I asked. Unlike the more staged feeding platforms found elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Bukit Lawang's guides are required to keep a minimum distance and avoid direct contact, since these orangutans were once part of a rehabilitation program and are gradually meant to behave as fully wild animals again.

On our second morning trek, Anto pointed out an older female by a scar pattern on her arm, a survivor of the 2003 flash flood that devastated the village, an event locals still refer to simply as the big water. He told the story slowly, stopping the group under a tree, the way it seemed he had told it many times before but still meant every time.

Further along the trail Anto explained a local belief that a shy, rarely seen forest spirit called an orang bunian sometimes leads travelers gently off the marked path if they are careless or disrespectful of the jungle. He was quick to add that most guides treat this as a practical safety story told to children, more a warning about staying on the trail than a literal claim, though he admitted he still felt a small chill saying it out loud in the forest itself.

Bunaken

A wall that drops straight down, and a sea turtle that did not care I was there

My flight out of Sumatra connected back through Manado, and Yosi refused to let me sit in a transit lounge for six hours when Bunaken National Marine Park was less than an hour away by boat. He met me at the airport with my dive gear already borrowed from his neighbor, and we were on the water before I had even fully registered I was back in North Sulawesi.

Bunaken's reputation rests on its wall diving, coral reef that drops almost vertically from just below the surface down past thirty meters, and Yosi took me to a stretch near Lekuan where the wall itself is so close to shore you can start the descent within a few fin kicks of the boat. A green sea turtle drifted past close enough to touch, utterly unbothered by either of us, grazing on sponge along the reef face as though we were not there at all.

Between dives we ate on the boat, grilled corn and fried tempeh Yosi's neighbor had packed that morning, and he pointed out that most visitors book Bunaken through Manado hotels without realizing the park entry fee, paid once per calendar year rather than per dive, directly funds the ranger patrols that keep dynamite fishing out of these specific reefs, a problem that still affects less protected waters elsewhere in the region.

On the second dive, in a channel Yosi called by a local name I never quite caught, we drifted with the current past a resting whitetip reef shark tucked under a ledge, and Yosi surfaced afterward grinning behind his mask, saying he still gets the same rush showing this reef to a first timer that he did the very first time he dived it himself, years ago.

Yogyakarta and Borobudur

Stone carvings older than most nations, and a bicycle bell at five in the morning

Anto handed me off to his university friend Dwi for this leg, since Dwi grew up in Yogyakarta and still lives two streets from the kraton, the sultan's palace complex. We stayed at Dwi's aunt's guesthouse behind a batik shop on Jalan Prawirotaman, a narrow lane full of small family run losmen rather than the international hotel chains further north.

Dwi woke me before four in the morning for Borobudur, since he insisted the sunrise ticket, bought separately from general admission, is the only way to be inside the temple grounds before the day crowds. We climbed in near darkness, and the ninth century stone reliefs slowly emerged out of the grey light rather than being lit all at once, which felt like the temple was arriving rather than simply being viewed.

Dwi explained the conservation ticket tiers over breakfast afterward, since Borobudur limits how many visitors can actually climb onto the upper stupas each day to protect the stone from erosion, a rule that surprises visitors who assume any ticket grants full access. We ate soto ayam at a stall near the temple gate that Dwi's father had been eating at since he was a student, the broth yellow with turmeric and loaded with glass noodles.

That afternoon we cycled to Prambanan rather than taking a car, weaving through rice paddies on a route Dwi's family has used for decades, arriving at the towering Hindu temple complex as the light turned gold. He told me the story of Loro Jonggrang, a princess turned to stone one temple short of a promised thousand, as we sat on the grass watching the spires catch the last sun.

Lombok and the Gili Islands

A volcano some finish and most do not, and three islands with no cars at all

Dwi's cousin Rian picked me up in Lombok two days later, a mountain guide who has led the Mount Rinjani trek more times than he could count on both hands when I asked. We started the climb at two in the morning from Senaru village, porters ahead of us carrying tents and cooking gear on shoulder poles, the trail switching between forest and open volcanic ridge as the sky slowly lightened.

Rian did not sugarcoat it. The final push to Rinjani's crater rim is loose volcanic scree on a steep incline, and he said roughly a third of the trekkers he guides turn back before the summit, which he considers a completely reasonable decision rather than a failure. We reached the rim as the sun cleared the horizon, the crater lake Segara Anak spread out turquoise far below us, steam rising faintly from a smaller cone inside the crater itself.

We came down exhausted two days later and Rian's family runs a small warung near the trailhead where we ate plate after plate of ayam taliwang, a fiery grilled chicken dish specific to Lombok, while his mother refused to let us pay for the second round.

From there Rian's boat contact took us across to the Gili Islands, three small islands where motorized vehicles are banned entirely, transport limited to bicycles and horse drawn cidomo carts. We stayed on Gili Air rather than the livelier Gili Trawangan, since Rian said Air kept more of its fishing village character, and spent two slow days doing nothing more ambitious than snorkeling straight off the beach and eating grilled fish by lantern light.

Tana Toraja

Cliffs that hold the dead, and a funeral that lasted three days

Back in Sulawesi, Yosi arranged for his university roommate Frans, a Torajan himself, to take me inland to Tana Toraja, a mountainous region he said most visitors to Sulawesi never bother reaching since it takes a full day's drive from Makassar. Frans grew up in a village near Rantepao, in a house shaped like the traditional tongkonan, a boat shaped roof rising sharply at both ends.

We happened to arrive during a rambu solo, a Torajan funeral ceremony, which Frans's extended family had invited us to attend as guests rather than spectators, a distinction he was firm about. The ceremony ran across three days, with buffalo sacrifice, communal feasting, and traditional dance, since in Torajan belief the deceased is not considered fully departed until the full funeral rites are complete, sometimes delayed months or years while a family saves for the ceremony's cost.

Frans walked me afterward to the cliff burial sites at Lemo, where coffins are set into carved rock faces high above the ground, guarded by rows of tau tau, carved wooden effigies dressed in the clothing of the deceased. He explained some families still return periodically to change the tau tau's clothing, a practice called ma'nene, treating the ancestors as present participants in family life rather than distant memory.

We ate pa'piong for dinner that night, meat and vegetables cooked slowly inside bamboo tubes over an open fire, at a long table with three generations of Frans's relatives, most of whom switched fluidly between Torajan, Indonesian, and fragments of English for my benefit.

Belitung

Granite boulders the size of houses, and a lighthouse built by people who never meant to stay

Frans put me in touch with a diving instructor named Wira for the final two legs of the trip, starting with a short flight from Jakarta to Belitung, an island off Sumatra's east coast that Wira said most Western travelers skip entirely in favor of Bali despite it being closer to Jakarta than many of Bali's own outer islands.

Wira picked me up on a rented scooter and took me straight to Tanjung Tinggi beach, where granite boulders the size of small houses sit stacked along white sand in formations that genuinely do not look real in photographs, let alone in person. We hired a small wooden boat the next morning to Lengkuas Island, climbing the narrow spiral stairs of a nineteenth century Dutch lighthouse still standing from the colonial tin mining era, the view from the top stretching across a scatter of smaller granite islets.

On the way back Wira detoured to Kaolin Lake, an abandoned clay quarry that has filled with rainwater over the years, turning an almost artificial looking electric blue against the white clay banks. He told me most locals still call it by its old mining name rather than any tourist branded title, since the lake's beauty is essentially an accident of industry rather than anything designed.

We ate gangan, a yellow fish soup specific to Belitung, at a warung near the harbor that Wira said had been run by the same family since before the island had any organized tourism at all, the broth sharp with turmeric and tamarind.

Dieng Plateau

Cold enough for frost in the tropics, and craters that still bubble

Dwi rejoined me for this leg, since Dieng sits in Central Java not far from his family's home region, a volcanic highland plateau most visitors rushing between Yogyakarta and Mount Bromo skip entirely. We arrived by car in the late afternoon, the air noticeably colder at two thousand meters than anywhere else on this trip, cold enough that a light frost called embun upas occasionally forms on the grass before dawn in the coldest months.

We stayed in a simple homestay near the Arjuna temple complex, some of the oldest surviving Hindu stone temples in Java, dating to the eighth century and considerably less crowded than anything in Yogyakarta. Dwi walked me at dusk to Sikidang Crater, where the ground itself bubbles with grey mud and sulfur gas vents hiss audibly from cracks in the earth, roped paths keeping visitors at a safe distance from the hottest spots.

The next morning we climbed Sikunir Peak before dawn with a small group of local university students on a weekend trip, reaching the summit just as the sun cleared the horizon over a sea of cloud, Mount Sindoro and Sumbing visible in the distance. Dwi pointed out Telaga Warna on the way down, a lake that shifts between emerald green and turquoise depending on the mineral content and the light, locals gathering along its edge in the late morning simply to sit.

We ate mie ongklok that evening, a noodle dish specific to the Dieng highlands served with a thick tapioca based sauce, at a roadside stall crowded with local families rather than any visible tourists.

Bawean Island

An island where most of the men are somewhere else, and a deer found nowhere else on Earth

The final stop came almost by accident. Wira's brother works the ferry route out of Gresik near Surabaya, and when I mentioned I had a free two days before my flight home, he offered to get me a spot on the fast boat to Bawean, an island in the Java Sea that he said almost nobody outside East Java has ever heard of.

The crossing took just over three hours, and he warned me in advance to take motion sickness tablets, since the boat rocks hard once past the shelter of the mainland coast. Bawean is sometimes called Pulau Putri, the Island of Women, since a large share of the male population works abroad or elsewhere in Indonesia for long stretches, leaving women running much of daily island life, a fact Wira's brother mentioned matter of factly rather than as a curiosity for visitors.

We rented a scooter in Sangkapura, the main town, and rode inland toward Lake Kastoba, set inside the crater of Bawean's long extinct volcano, the island's interior hilly and thickly forested compared to the flat coastal road that circles it. Along the way Wira's brother pointed out a small protected reserve for the Bawean deer, a species found nowhere else on the planet outside this one island, and we waited quietly at the forest edge until two of them stepped out to graze near dusk.

Over dinner, plain grilled fish and rice at a warung near the port, he mentioned the island's name is said to come from a Sanskrit phrase meaning sunlight exists, supposedly exclaimed by shipwrecked sailors centuries ago upon finally seeing clear skies after days of storm. He also pointed out, almost as an afterthought, that the waters just offshore were the site of a real wartime naval battle in March 1941, when three Allied warships were sunk nearby, a piece of history that has left almost no mark on how the island is written about today.