Product Description

Stretch your hand through ancient stone latticework to touch the lucky Buddhas atop Java's majestic Borobudur.

Drink with the deceased (and try not to slip on buffalo blood!) at an elaborate and riotous Torajan funeral.

Sniff out the infamous durian, scaly salak or spiky rumbutan at a local fruit market.

Step aside as a giant Komodo dragon swaggers slowly by, with the confidence only 100kg of top-of-the-food-chain lizard can exude.

Eleven authors, more than 300 days of in-country research, 73 ferry trips, 197 detailed maps, 205 bowls of nasi goreng. Includes in-depth information on volcano trekking, surfing, diving, orang-utan watching and the best adventure opportunities across the entire archipelago.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40669 in Books
• Brand: Lonely Planet
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 924 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781741044355
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
…Lonely Planet, the intrepid traveler's bible...' --Los Angeles Times, April 2005

From the Publisher
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What We Believe
We believe that travel leads to a deeper cultural understanding and compassion and therefore a better world.

Customer Reviews

The Only Updated Guide to Indonesia - still far from perect though
This is currently by default both the best overall guide to Indonesia for independent travellers, and the only one that is remotely up to date.
The competition (Moon, Footprint, Rough Guides) seems to have given up covering this vast archipelago years ago. For this reason alone, the book still gets 4 stars from me, despite some shortcomings and amusingly striking errors outlined later.
It definitely covers enough attractions to keep people occupied for months, and is more than enough for those with an average interest in the country.
As usual with this series, it covers practical details like prices, public transport and city maps, though unusually for Lonely Planet, many prices in this book (especially for public transport and guiding services) seem to be the result of guesswork by the authors, and even a year after the book was published, I found that they were actually considerably LOWER than those listed here!
There is also more than enough background information about culture and history for most readers, although unfortunately some useful things that were still present in the previous edition, like an overview of national parks and the longer lists of recommended books about various aspects and regions of the country have now been removed. Many less frequented islands, towns and areas that were still described in several previous editions have now been omitted, too.
On a brighter note, there is realistic, up to date assesment of the much-improved security situation in formerly strife-torn regions like Aceh and Maluku, encouraging tourists to return there.

Unfortunately, coverage of the remoter, less-visited regions remains poor.
The chapter on Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) has finally seen some long overdue changes, with non-existing attractions removed and real ones added, but info on almost anything outside the big, boring, modern coastal cities (which are covered in masochistic detail) is so vague that it makes one wonder if the author has ever left the urban jungles at all. My impression is that if she did, she certainly didn't get far!
That is still better than the chapter on Papua (Indonesian New Guinea).
Long the weakest, nearly useless part of this guide, one gets the impression that the Japanese lady "updating" it for this edition has never set foot there, and thus simply lifted all content over from the previous guides, updating hotel and transport prices with the aid of her telephone. Her information about how to cross the border with Papua New Guinea is spectacularly wrong, and there is almost nothing in that chapter that hadn't been there in the previous editions.

There are also some striking errors in the general sections dealing with the whole country.
As in the previous edition, the color section on "Indonesian" fauna proudly includes a shot of a Green Iguana from South America, this time with the added caption "Iguanas can be found in parks such as Taman Nasional Bali Barat" - in reality there are no iguanas anywhere in Asia. Similarly, the "Beguiling Beasties" itinerary recommended for wildlife fans says "you can try spotting the rare bird of paradise on the islands around Pulau Biak". Ironically, Biak and its neighbouring islands happen to be the ONLY part of Papua where there are NO birds of paradise! ;-) Plus covering that entire itinerary would take you several months (which your visa won't allow), and even then you would still have to skip the Foja Mountains of Papua (highly recommended by the author based on news reports) which are in reality so remote and inaccessible that even well-supported scientific expeditions have only made it there a few times.
But my favourite blunder is in the Getting there & Away chapter at the back of the book, listing international border crossings, where the author says "...there are two boats a week between Dili in East Timor and Oecussi in [Indonesian] West Timor." A boat on that route does exist, the only slight difference being that both of those towns are in independent East Timor, outside the borders of Indonesia!
Couldn't LP get authors who at least know where Indonesia ends and its neighbours start this time??? :-)

So those with a deeper interest in Indonesia, or with an interest in a particular region, might prefer more detailed, regional guides to those areas - there are several covering Bali & Lombok to choose from, Lonely Planet has great (if ageing) guides to Java and Nusa Tenggara, while Periplus has eight separate ones to all parts of the country, though the Periplus ones are best backed up with this book for practical details.

Those who have already been to Indonesia and own the previous edition of this book, might as well just keep it instead of investing into this new effort. Most of the content is exactly the same (or missing), with only the layout and prices changed - and the prices will have changed again by the time you get to Indonesia anyway.

For first-timers, this remains the best single-volume guide to buy though - even if only by default.

good- but very very broad
I'm at the end of my 4 months living in Jakarta. I bought this book in the states before going but when I arrived in Jakarta, i was originally very disappointed by the thinness of the jakarta section. The lack of depth was a problem throughout the book. However, I later traveled to Yogjakarta, Bandung, Bogor, Bali, Lombok, and the Gili Islands, making this book actually pretty useful. Although it doesn't have extensive information on each area, it does cover a lot of areas in a good-enough way.

However.. since the vast majority of people who come to Indonesia do not actually travel to many different places (usually just around Bali, or Java), I would recommend a book which focuses more on the place you will actually go, since you are otherwise paying for and carrying around a lot more bulk than is necessary.

(Update 2009): Last summer, i spent another 2 months in Indonesia during which I was based in Yogyakarta. I again had the great opportunity of doing a lot of internal traveling, particularly within Java. I would like to again say that this book has a huge breadth of knowledge about soo many different amazing places way off of the beaten track of Bali. My indonesian girlfriend had not even heard of many of them... i was able to really get in touch - a deep touch - with indonesia.

900 pages and not that great
Highlights of disappointment - The review of Pasar Seni (art/handicraft market) doesn't tell you it's in the middle of some kind of disneyland that you have to pay admission to get into and, once there, has very little of interest. Also, I want to go to the Textile Museum but it doesn't even receive a mention in the book. The hotel front desk says it doesn't open until 2 on Sundays and one website says it opens at 9:30 so I need a tie-breaker. This book weighs a ton but lacks a lot.