Indonesia has had an unfair share of bad luck recently. What with two separate bomb attacks on tourists in Bali in 2002 and 2005 , a number of internal conflicts, and the 2004 Tsunami, which affected large areas of Sumatra and Java, many people have stayed away in the belief that it's not safe to travel here. All this has made life very difficult for those in the tourist industry, but makes a visit to Indonesia even more delightful for those of us willing to brave their beautiful beaches. (Bomb risk? Try living on the Northern Line…).
The fact that geo-politics have hit Indonesia hard is actually not so surprising. The first thing you realise when planning a trip here is that the place is absolutely huge. The world’s largest archipelago, it comprises 17,508 tropical islands – big and small – which stretch across two different time zones, from the border with Malaysian Borneo right down to East Timor, just a stone’s throw (well, in Aussie terms anyway) from Australia. Governing such a vast and disjointed place would be difficult enough, but add to that 500 languages and a widespread inter-mingling of Islam and Christianity - both often fused with ancient animist beliefs -and you have a potentially incendiary mix. 
We were heading for the mainly Catholic island of Sulawesi, historically known as Celebes, which lies just south of Borneo. Sulawesi’s bizarre shape results from being at the point where the land masses of Asia and Australasia divide. The demarcation is known as The Wallace Line, after Alfred Wallace, the British naturalist who pointed out the remarkable difference in fauna between Celebes and Borneo (despite their close proximity) to Charles Darwin, who subsequently included it in his theory of evolution.
Sulawesi’s geographical position also places it right in the heart of the ‘Coral Triangle’, the area of greatest biodiversity of marine life to be found anywhere on the planet. Scuba diving in the Celebes Sea off North Sulawesi is generally accepted as being some of the best out there, and we therefore made a bee-line for this amazing underwater world.
We divided our time between Bunaken Marine Park and the Lembeh Straits – two quite different areas, with different attractions. On our first few dives at Bunaken, albeit amid some very strong currents, we spotted a green turtle as big as my parent’s dining table; large eagle rays flying gracefully through the water; orang-utan crabs – named for their hairy orange legs - and numerous bright neon nudibranches (sea slugs) hanging out on the coral. 
At Lembeh, we were gifted with sights of more weird and wonderful critters: tiny pygmy sea-horses (no bigger than a little finger nail); all kinds of very poisonous scorpion fish, the spectacularly ugly frog fish and an extremely rare electric clam, which rather frighteningly crackled with bright blue sparks underwater. Thanks to our brilliant dive guide, we even witnessed the mating ritual of the beautiful and very shy mandarin fish: a truly magical ten minutes spent just inches away from a live ‘Blue Planet’ spectacle. As we watched, I could almost hear David Attenborough’s familiar dulcet tones giving the running commentary. This is what seeing the world is all about. 
But it didn’t stop there. Then came a trek through Sulawesi’s amazing tribal interior of Tana Toraja: a heady mix of ancient funeral rites, gory animal sacrifice and three days spent balancing on the edge of slippery clay rice terraces as seasonal rains seemed determined to make our trek more challenging. At night we stayed in the Torajan’s extraordinary traditional family homes, sleeping on hard floors, teaching the village kids English with our scrabble set and eating food cooked in bamboo shoots. With sore muscles and on the point of exhaustion, we arrived back at Makassar airport with no idea where we should go next, and no onward ticket out of Sulawesi. When a flight to Denpasar, Bali, became available, we could think of nothing better than a bit of beach time.
Kuta Beach, Bali is Australia’s answer to the Costa del Sol, only much cooler and with surf shops, cute boutiques and not to mention gorgeous surfer types everywhere. In fact, further up the beach in Seminyak you could liken it more to Ibiza than the Costa; here, cool bars and clubs attract international DJs, and people party until the wee hours (things don’t even get going until 2am). That said, Kuta isn’t exactly classy. If you want the traditional Balinese honeymoon brochure holiday you’re better off somewhere else on the island, but we were very happy to get a beer and backpacker fix there (although we did escape for two days to do our Padi Rescue Diver course at the spectacular Liberty Wreck), and by spending a few days on the lesser known Gili Islands, where despite torrential rain and the first ever police raid on the island’s famously liberal party scene, we enjoyed a drunken few days in the company of travellers from the UK and Sweden. 
