Ken Kochey

I went in search of dragons and found sapphire-blue starfish instead. It wasn't just a few, mind you, but a constellation nesting in a translucent bay within Indonesia's Komodo National Park. There's an obvious metaphor or two in thatthe futility of expectations, the power of beauty over the beastbut I'm easily distracted, and at the time, while snorkeling just a few strokes off tiny Kanawa island, I'd become too preoccupied by the parade of neon fish gliding past my mask to give those frightful dragons (overfed lizards, really) any thought at all. In between swims, I'd sit under the bamboo roof of Kanawa's only restaurant, facing an empty beach of sparkling golden sands, play chess on a battered wooden board with one of the local guides, and seriously consider not writing about this island. Why not keep it to myself a little while longer.

By that point in the trip, having already hop-scotched around six Indonesian islands, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Years earlier, I had fallen hard for Bali but later discovered I wasn't the only woman in its life. I remember reading, with a sinking heart, that Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Lovedoubled the number of visitors to the island, and that was before Julia Roberts arrived on the scene. Granted, even Hollywood couldn't spoil a place as enchanting as Bali, but still, I was ready to move on. And I knew just the person to help. As luck would have it, my brother's wife, Sumena, is both Indonesian (born in Sumatra) and an ardent traveler. "You do know," she pointed out, in her eminently sensible way, "that Indonesia has thousands of other islandsthousandsthat hardly anyone visits. Or at least hardly any Americans." It took some timeyears, in factbefore Sumena finally agreed to travel with me to the other Indonesia.

Given that the Indonesian archipelago consists of more than four hundred volcanoes, many of them still twitchy, its messy topography is easily explained. The exact number of islands ebbs and flows with each tectonic rumbling, but these days the country's tourism office counts 17,508, all shapes and sizes, spattered around the equator. Only 6,000 are inhabited. From east to west, the island chain stretches across an area as wide as the continental United States.

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Indonesia does not lack variety. Don't take my word for it: The nineteenth-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's more modest peer, rhapsodized about its astonishing biodiversity in his seminal work The Malay Archipelago. Wallace wrote that the wildlife on Bali differs as much from that of the neighboring island of Lombok, a mere fifteen miles away, as America's animals differ from Europe's. The contrast between the critters on Java (the most populous island) or Borneo (the wildest) and Sulawesi (the most mountainous) is still more striking, he noted. Orangutans, man's smartest relative, live on Sumatra (the largest island) and Borneoand nowhere else in the world. Likewise, Komodo dragons are found only on a few small islands in the southeast. On Sulawesi alone are a bunch of endemic animals so quirky that they warrant their own Pixar film, starring, say, the feisty dwarf buffalo, the timid tailless monkey, and the nightlife-loving civet. But Indonesia's diversity is hardly limited to wildlife.

Here, a horse-cart driver at Hotel Tugu Lombok, on Balis less-touristedand slower-pacedneighbor. Photographer: Ken Kochey

Each of the country's roughly three hundred ethnic groups has its own language, customs, and food. Though Islam is the dominant religion (Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population), the Balinese are mostly Hindu. Other islands have a majority Christian population, courtesy of the Portuguese spice traders and the Dutch missionaries, while Buddhism is widely practiced among the seven-million-strong Chinese community (which includes my sister-in-law's family). Animism, with its high-maintenance spirit gods, is alive and well in the rural areas, though some of its more notorious practicesheadhunting, cannibalismhave gone out of fashion. Violent ethnic conflicts flare up every so often, and the country grapples with its own homegrown terrorist groups, which carried out devastating bombings in Bali in 2002 and 2005 and in Jakarta in 2003 and 2009. But Indonesia's complex geography and long history as a cultural crossroads, not to mention the government's vigorous counter-terrorism efforts, have mostly helped to keep the peace.

Over dinner in northern Sumatra one night, my new friend Imam isn't interested in discussing his country's cultural diversity, nor my country's. "Have you seen Toy Story 2? What about A Bug's Life?" He interrogates me tenaciously, as only a ten-year-old could. We are in his family's modest, cheerfully decorated home in the town of Bukit Lawang, the gateway to Gunung Leuser (Mount Leuser) National Park, where I have spent the morning stalking orangutans. Imam's father, Masno, is the chef at the Bukit Lawang Ecolodge, a colony of tidy bungalows and carefully tended gardens just outside the park. He and his wife also run their own place, Masno Caf and Cake, out of their home. The restaurant was closed that night, but Masno has invited me to join his family for dinner, preceded by a lesson in Indonesian home cooking. I sit with him, his bubbly wife, Misnawati, and Imam on a mat in their living room, weighing peanuts and palm sugar on a small scale and measuring the rest of the ingredients for the gado-gado: star anise, tamarind, chili, ginger, garlicall collected from the backyard garden. Aceh province, where police raided a jihadist training camp last year and where some villages have recently adopted sharia law, is just a mountain range away. But here in this Muslim home, where Misnawati lowers her voice and wrinkles her nose when she frets about Sumatran-born terrorists, where Imam's DVD collection rivals my niece's and nephew's in Los Angeles, and where Masno vacuum-seals the gado-gado for me to take home to New York, it might as well be in a different galaxy.

I am already reaping the rewards of being one of the few foreigners in a place that is genuinely happy to see them andrather poignantly, I thinkeager to welcome many more. Admittedly, Gunung Leuser is one of the most popular tourist attractions on Sumatra, and giant tour buses do occasionally barrel down the main roads. But considering that Sumatra (twice the size of Great Britain) welcomes about 1.6 million foreign visitors a year while Bali, about the size of Delaware, gets more than two million, you can see how Bukit Lawang might feel somewhat lonely. Sumena has opted to meet me on the next leg of the trip, so I travel on my own to Bukit Lawangbut never stay that way for long. I arrive on a Sunday afternoon, just as the local families are settling into picnics on the rocky banks of the Bohorok River, which fronts my hotel. Several of the chattering, head-scarved women invite me to join them.

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Best-Kept Secret Islands of Indonesia