Indonesia is the world’s 4th most populous country with over 275 million inhabitants. It’s made up of 17,000 islands, many unpopulated and with half of the population living on the island of Java.

I had been lucky enough to spend a month in Bali and Lombok over 30 years ago,, enroute to a 2 year work secondment in Australia.

This time, travelling with my wife, we had a similar amount of time but we were travelling at the start of the rainy season, meaning occasional downpours followed by sunshine in this beautiful country.

We split our time across a number of locations but it would have been great to have more time to visit further east and west of this country but even with a whole month here we had to make some tough choices.

Our first stop was Bali, staying in Cheggu, Ubud and Sanur. Bali remains a beautiful island but with its headline status it’s also the most commercialised too.

From Bali we flew to Labuan Bajo on the island of Flores, it’s just a 1hr internal flight. You can also sail from Bali to Flores, it’s a 3-4 day journey that we decided against given the travel time and it being the rainy season!

Flores is the staging point for day trips out to Komodo island.

From Flores we headed back to Bali for one night before heading by boat to some of the smaller islands off of Lombok. First to Gili Air, in the north west Gili’s.

From Gili Air we traveled to the lesser known south west Gili’s, staying on Gili Asahan, just a short boat ride from the south west of Lombok.

Indonesia has been fab, so much more to see, we will be back!

Now off to Australia!