Like a string of jewels in a coral sea, the 13,000 plus islands of the indonesian archipelago stretch almost 5000 km from the Asian mainland into the Pacifc Ocean. And like jewels the islands have long represented wealth. A thousand years ago, the Chinese sailed as far as Timor to load up cargoes of sandalwood and beeswax; by the 16th century the spice islands of the Moluccas (Maluku) were luring European navigators in search of cloves, nutmeg and mace, once so rare and expensive that bloody wars were fought for control of their production and trade. The Dutch ruled for almost 350 years, drawing their fortunes from the islands whose rich volcanic soil could produce two crops of rice a year, as well as commercially valuable crops like coffee, sugar, tobacco and teak.
Indonesia possesses some remarkable sights: the funeral ceremonies of the Torajas in the highlands of Central Sulawesi, the Buddhist temple of Borobodur and the Hindu complex of Prambanan on Java, Keli Mutu in Flores with the colored lakes that fill its volcanic craters, the continuous festivals on Bali, the Ngada people on Flores, the brillant coral reefs on Pulau Bunaken off Manado, and on the Togian islands in Sulawesi,
the wooden wayang golek puppets manipulated into life by the puppetmasters of Yogyakarta in Java,
the lumbering leather-skinned dragons of Komodo and Rinca islands .......
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