Journey Through Indonesia: An Unforgettable Journey from Sumatra to Papua

Extremely well-done book with a beautiful balance of photos and text, plus perspective on the nation's history and current issues. Well worth reading and studying if you are planning an adventure in the area.

I loved this book! Well written and insightful.

Sehr schöne Bilder und Aufmachung, Preis-Leistung top

If you are planning to travel to Indonesia, this book offers some ideas which places to visit. If you have been there it will bring back nice memories or may inspire you to visit back again.

It is a glorified tourist brochure. It wasn't a gripping read. It was nice and there wasn't really anything to make anyone feel uncomfortable. There are no pictures of orphaned baby orang-utans or seas and rivers full of plastic waste or anything like that. The closest Tim Hannigan comes to criticising the Indonesian authorities is on page 96 when he says that Orangutans were once widespread across the whole of Borneo, though deforestation for timber and the palm oil industry has seen their habitat become increasingly fragmented. There isn't a single picture of the deforestation and subsequent palm-oil plantations. There is something of a hint of criticism, maybe even dislike, of the Dutch running throughout the book, which bursts out into a full-blown attack on Dutch colonialism on page 62 when Tim Hannigan says that the conquest of Bali involved appalling bloodshed, and he pokes fun at them on pages 92 & 93 when he says that a colloquial Indonesian name [for the proboscis monkey] is monyet Belanda, "Dutch monkey". As far as locals are concerned, the pot-bellied, long-nosed simians look a lot like colonial-era Dutchmen! On page 118 Tim Hannigan says that the Dutch clung on [to the then Dutch half of New Guinea] long after the rest of Indonesia gained independence, only relinquishing control under international pressure in the early 1960s, by which time there was an insurmountable gulf between Indonesian national ambitions and the aspirations of many Papuans. There are different ways of seeing things. Another person could have said that there is an insurmountable gulf between Javanese imperial ambitions and the aspirations of many Papuans to be an independent nation. Far better, maybe, in what is really a tourist brochure, to leave out the polemical stuff. As a general criticism I thought that the captions to the photographs were written in too small a type, but for the rest the pictures and the general layout was fine. I, personally, see Indonesia as being an Empire. It is not appropriate to discuss here in an Amazon book review or in Tim Hannigan's Journey through Indonesia, how it happened, but somehow, for whatever reason, Java in effect took over from the Dutch a vast empire that stretched from Sabang in Sumatra to Merauke in Papua - New Guinea. It is a beautiful place, with much to commend it to the tourist, and then Tim Hannigan's book entitled Journey through Indonesia is a fine book with lots of really nice pictures and interesting snippets of information / description in bite-sized chunks that make it eminently readable ... the, I think, out-of-place digs at the Dutch notwithstanding. This is, after all, something of a glorified tourist brochure.