Luxury Indonesia Vacations

Indonesia stretches across more than 17,000 islands and three time zones, from Sumatra in the west to Papua in the east. It is the world’s largest archipelago nation and home to more than 270 million people, most of them Muslim.

Bali is the exception, an island where the large majority of residents are Hindu and where village temples, family compounds, and the subak water-sharing system still organize much of local life.

The south of the island holds its beach towns. Seminyak has the island’s densest run of restaurants and boutiques, while the limestone cliffs of the Bukit Peninsula around Uluwatu hold private villas above the surf breaks.

Inland, Ubud and the villages around it sit among rice terraces and river gorges, a few degrees cooler than the coast and noticeably slower. East and north Bali, including the Sidemen Valley and the highlands around Munduk, see a fraction of the visitors and suit the final days of a trip.

A morning at Tirta Empul, a temple built around a holy spring near Tampaksiring, can begin with the melukat purification ritual led by a local priest, moving along the line of carved spouts in the spring-fed pools as Balinese families do on ceremony days.

Later in the week, Pura Luhur Uluwatu, the temple on the island’s southwestern cliffs, hosts the Kecak dance at sunset, performed by a circle of men chanting as the light drops over the Indian Ocean.

Between the two, a private guide can lead a walk through the terraces at Jatiluwih on the slopes of Mount Batukaru, part of Bali’s UNESCO-listed subak landscape and far quieter than the terraces closer to Ubud.

Beyond Bali, a short domestic flight reaches Labuan Bajo on Flores, where private phinisi boats sail into Komodo National Park to see Komodo dragons on Rinca and Komodo Islands, with snorkeling stops over the reefs in between. On Java, Borobudur, the ninth-century Buddhist monument outside Yogyakarta, is best visited early in the morning before the day’s visitors arrive.

The Sidemen Valley in East Bali has rice terraces with a clear view of Mount Agung and villages where songket, a cloth woven with gold and silver thread, is still made by hand. It is about an hour and a half from Ubud and sees few tour groups.

In the north, the highlands around Munduk are planted with clove and coffee, with waterfalls a short walk from the road and the twin lakes of Buyan and Tamblingan below.

Off the northwest coast, Menjangan Island sits within West Bali National Park and is reached by boat, with coral walls close enough to the surface for snorkelers as well as divers.

Ngurah Rai International Airport, near Denpasar in the south of Bali, is the main arrival point for almost every luxury itinerary.

There are no nonstop flights from the US, so travelers typically connect through a hub such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Doha, or Dubai. US citizens can get a visa on arrival or apply online in advance for a 30-day stay, extendable once, and Bali also collects a separate tourist levy from international visitors.

From the airport, a private driver reaches Ubud in about an hour and Uluwatu in under an hour, though traffic in the south can add considerably to both. Fast boats from Sanur and Padang Bai connect to the Nusa Islands, Lombok, and the Gili Islands, and domestic flights link Bali to Labuan Bajo for Komodo and to Yogyakarta for Borobudur.

Bali’s airport closes for 24 hours on Nyepi, the Balinese Day of Silence, which usually falls in March, so travel dates around it are planned with care.