Indonesia

Indonesia is the largest archipelago on earth — more than seventeen thousand islands strung along the equator — and the scale is the first thing a traveller has to plan around. A trip that treats it as one destination falters; a trip that picks an island or two and goes deep tends to work.

Bali is the entry point for most and has paid for its popularity, but the considered version of it still exists — the upland ricefields around Ubud, the temple culture, the long-running wellness and plant-forward scene that put the island on this kind of map. Beyond it, Java holds the great Buddhist and Hindu monuments at Borobudur and Prambanan; the Komodo and Flores chain offers dragons and some of the region's best diving; Sumatra has its orangutans; and Raja Ampat, off the Papuan coast, holds the richest marine biodiversity yet measured anywhere.

May through September is the dry season across most of the archipelago and the operational default for diving, island-hopping and the volcano climbs. The wet months are not a write-off, but the boat transfers grow less reliable.