Everything you need to know about Indonesia
Explore Indonesia from Sumatra and Java to Kalimantan, Sulawesi, the Lesser Sunda Islands, Maluku and Papua. Learn its provinces, cities and waters, locate fifteen sights, discover the histories and everyday life behind them, then practise Indonesian. Regional languages and community traditions are also part of the country’s life.
Read it, then make it stick
Geography of Indonesia
An equatorial archipelago links two oceans through volcanic islands, forests and mountain ranges.
Know the shape of the country
Start with all 38 provinces, including the six provinces in Indonesian Papua, then place 24 cities and find four rivers, Lake Toba, six seas and the Makassar Strait. Zoom in for Jakarta, Yogyakarta and smaller islands. Province boundaries: © denyherianto, CC BY 4.0, repaired and relabelled for learning; small islands may be omitted. Waters and context land: Natural Earth, public domain. City coordinates are curated. These are generalised learning maps. Sea targets identify geographic waters rather than maritime claims; Nusantara is not an extra province.
Places worth visiting
Essential · Buddhist temple
Borobudur
Terraces, carved reliefs and stupas form a monumental Buddhist pilgrimage landscape. Borobudur is a separate site from the Hindu temples of Prambanan.
Locate Java’s temple compounds and volcanoes, Sumatra’s caldera lake and Bali’s temples, then explore the wildlife, highland villages and spice islands farther east. Essential is our shortlist for a first trip, and worth a detour goes further. Select a pin to read about a place, then play the map and find them all.
Take Indonesian with you
Greetings and politeness
Hello, please, thank you, sorry: the ten openers everything else builds on.
Keep going one country deeper
When you have had your fill of Indonesia, the countries marked guide have a page like this one, and every other has maps of its own.
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