What is big, sweaty, and brings a lot of pleasure? Jakarta, of course! The mighty city is the capital of the Indonesian archipelago, home to over 8 million Indonesians, and a place where traffic mayhem and humidity merge into one heady cocktail. Originally named Batavia, it was formed by the Dutch as the hub of their East Indies colony. Its kota (i.e. city centre) has a port that still houses numerous elegant tall ships, homage to its trading past; and the cei...

The room smells like there has been an explosion in a nearby sewage plant. Cockroaches scuttle across the floor and walls. An unspecified insect the size of a playing card sits by the window. We are awoken loudly at 6am. No, it's all right - we're not in jail. We are, in fact, in one of the beach resorts of Carita's top hotels, the Paniisan. If this is as good as it gets in Carita, what on earth are we doing here, you may ask. The answer, unsurprisingly,...

Indonesia definitely needs to have a long, hard look at itself. For a country so apparently popular with tourists it does seem to have an unhealthy obsession with attractions, mainly volcanoes, which require inordinately early starts. Yes, folks, it was another 4am wake-up call. After being greeted with a breakfast of chocolate drop sandwiches and hard boiled eggs, we set off to drive to the base of yet another volcano - this one was called Mount Ijen. I had to...

So after two days of doing very little other than sit by our private pool (no one said it would be easy), we got the overnight train eastwards to Blitar. Except that we slept through Blitar and arrived in Malang instead. Isn't travel wonderfully flexible?! Malang is a lovely old Dutch town with some of the colonial architecture intact. Most of it has been suped up but there is enough of the traditional profiles to make a stroll about town very pleasant. Also the...

Cambodia has Angkor Wat. Mexico has Chichen-Itza. The UK has Watford. And Indonesia has Borobudur. Java's, indeed Indonesia's, most popular tourist attraction is near the city of Yogyakarta, in the shadow of a couple of muttering volcanoes, and amongst large tracts of steaming jungle - a spectacular setting for ancient Borobudur. The site itself is a Buddhist temple complex, built around 800-900AD. Subsequently, ash from volcanoes buried it for centuries, o...