It might be a vast archipelago of 13,000 or 17,000 islands, depending on what classification is used, and stretching a distance comfortably greater than the width of the US, but many visitors to Indonesia often get only as far as Bali or Java. Of the roughly 16 million foreign tourists recorded in 2019, the year before the Covid travel lockdowns, over 6.3 million landed on Bali, home to just over 4 million of the archipelago’s almost 280 million people, with many of the rest landing in capital J
Part of the problem has been a lack of direct flights from Bali to other attractive destinations, meaning such itineraries often requiring round-the-houses trips via the capital, or else time-consuming island hops by boat. Local airline TransNusa is aiming to do something about this by laying on three direct flights a week from Bali to Manado, a city on the island of Sulawesi, east of Borneo and south of the Philippines, and a popular diving spot.
It might be a vast archipelago of 13,000 or 17,000 islands, depending on what classification is used, and stretching a distance comfortably greater than the width of the US, but many visitors to Indonesia often get only as far as Bali or Java. Of the roughly 16 million foreign tourists recorded in 2019, the year before the Covid travel lockdowns, over 6.3 million landed on Bali, home to just over 4 million of the archipelago’s almost 280 million people, with many of the rest landing in capital J