Photo. The colourful Indonesia exhibiton on the Norwegian International Meeting and Travel Fair, Reiseliv, 2007.
Indonesia is in fact the largest archipelago in the world with a thousand islands, 17,508 to be precise, spread in an area between the Asian continent and Australia.
With a population of over 200 million, it is the world's fourth most populous country and the most populous Muslim-majority nation. Indonesia is the world's third largest democracy after India and the USA. Its capital is Jakarta and it shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Malaysia.
Borobudur is the worlds largest Buddhist stupa. Ten stories high and over 120m wide and long, it has nine concentric terraces - Six square and three round, trimmed with over 1'000 buddhist relief panels - the treasures of Borobudur.
The temple, in Indonesia was built around the 8th century BC, but abandoned just a few centuries later. Eventually, it was buried under dirt, volcanic ash and wild vegetation, and remained so for centuries.
Indonesia has around three hundred ethnic groups, each with cultural differences that have shifted over the centuries. Modern-day Indonesian culture is a fusion of this diversity. Indonesia has also imported cultural aspects from Arabic, Chinese, Malay and European sources.
The big country has many opportunities for great adventures, both on sunny beaches, exotic wild life and meeting tribes in dense jungles.
Stein Morten Lund, 30 January 2007
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