Luxury Holidays Indonesia
Indonesia straddles the Equator between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. While it has land borders with Malaysia to the north as well as East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the east, it also neighbors Australia to the south, and Palau, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, and Thailand to the north, India to the northwest.
Indonesia is home to no less than 167 active volcanoes, far more than any other country. Some of the more accessible for visitors are in the Bromo-Tengger-Semeru National Park and the Ijen Crater in East Java, Mount Rinjani in Lombok and perhaps easiest of all, Mount Batur in Bali.
Hardly surprisingly in the world's largest archipelago, beaches are significant attractions. Aside from the obvious like Bali, there are wonderful beaches in off-the-beaten-track locations in Maluku, Nusa Tenggara and Sulawesi. In a nation of 18,000+ islands, the options are almost endless.
Indonesia has some of the largest remaining tracts of tropical forest anywhere in the world, and these support an incredibly diverse wildlife from Orangutans and other primates to critically endangered Javan Rhinoceros and Tigers, and an extraordinarily wide range of bird species. Forest areas recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites are Ujung Kulon National Park in West Java, and three huge parks in Sumatra, which together comprise the Tropical Rain Forest Heritage of Sumatra: Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park, Gunung Leuser National Park and Kerinci Seblat National Park. Further east, Komodo Island is the home of the remarkable Komodo Dragon and a very diverse marine life. Close to the very eastern limit of Indonesia, the remote Lorentz National Park in Papua has a permanent glacier, and is the single largest national park anywhere in Southeast Asia.
Indonesia has a tropical climate, and divided into wet and dry season. The temperature varies little throughout the year. The average temperature in Jakarta is 26 °C-30 °C with some days getting a bit warmer but temperatures rarely drop below 22 °C. There are however differences in Indonesia between islands and even parts of islands and as Indonesia is pretty mountainous, it can get much cooler once you are ascending.
Generally, the western monsoon brings rains from December to March and the drier eastern monsoon brings relatively dry weather from June to September. Still, heavy rainshowers can occur on every day, but usually don't last longer than an hour in the late afternoon. Some places on Sumatra have extremly wet weather from October to December with 500 mm of rain on average during these months and become drier from January onwards. But during January it can get extremely wet on other islands more east, with Sumbawa hitting a massive 900 mm in this mont! Kalimantan has high rainfall during most months and doesn't have a drier season.