Indonesia [antikvár]

Introduction Ii Like a string of jewels in a coral sea, the 13,000 plus islands of the Indonesian archipelago stretch almost 5000 km from the Asian mainland into the Pacific Ocean. And like jewels the islands have long represented wealth. A thousand years ago the Chinese sailed as far as Timor to load up cargoes of sandalwood and beeswax; by the 16th century the spice islands of the Moluccas (Maluku) were luring European navigators in search of cloves, nutmeg and mace, once so rare and expensive that bloody wars were fought for control of their production and trade. The Dutch ruled for almost 350 years, drawing their fortunes from the islands whose rich volcanic soil could produce two crops of rice a year, as well as commercially valuable crops like coffee, sugar, tobacco and teak. Endowed with a phenomenal array of natural resources and strange cultures, Indonesia became a magnet for every shade of entrepreneur from the west - a stamping ground for proselytising missionaries, unscru- pulous traders, wayward adventurers, inspired artists. It has been overrun by Dutch and Japanese armies; surveyed, drilled, dug up and shipped off by foreign mining companies; Uttered with the 'transmigrants' of Java and Bali; and poked and prodded by ethnologists, linguists and anthropologists turning fading cultures into PhD theses. Now there is a new breed of visitor - the modern-day, tourist. After the 1991 'Visit Indonesia Year', the government decided to promote the 'Visit Indonesia Decade' to encourage even larger numbers of visitors by the year 2000. Places like Bali, Lombok, Torajaland on Sulawesi, and the Hindu-Buddhist monuments of Borobudur and Prambanan in Central Java attract huge numbers of visitors. On the other hand, much of the country remains barely touched by mass tourism, despite great improvements in communications and transport connections. Indonesia has thousands of islands with a myriad of different cultures, offering adventure that is hard to find in the modem world. S'i 1