Lonely Planet Indonesia (Country Travel Guide)

 (19 customer reviews)

Amazon has decided to combine reviews of both editions on this page, so I decided to add my thoughts on the 2010 edition to the end of this review, originally written for the previous one. I suggest that you read the whole thing if you are not familiar with the book yet, or scroll down towards the end if you just want to know what has changed in the latest edition.

The 2007 edition:

This is currently by default both the best overall guide to Indonesia for independent travellers, and the only one that is remotely up to date.
The competition (Moon, Footprint, Rough Guides) seems to have given up covering this vast archipelago years ago. For this reason alone, the book still gets 4 stars from me, despite some shortcomings and amusingly striking errors outlined later.
It definitely covers enough attractions to keep people occupied for months, and is more than enough for those with an average interest in the country.
As usual with this series, it covers...Read more

I am specifically commenting on the Kindle edition. In one word: unusable.

The Kindle might work for books that one reads from start to finish, but it does not work with a very large book that one browses through and where one jumps from one part (where one currently is) to a vastly different part of the book (where one plans to go next).

First of all, it lacks a table of contents, so you have no clue what is actually where in the book. I had to look into a printed copy to get an idea of the rough outline of the book.

There is no usable index either and even when using one of the hyperlinks they only take to a Kindle page in the approximate region. If you try to search for, let's say 'Bali' it will take you to all mentions of Bali in the book, which are hundreds. You can then skip through every single one of them to get to where you want to get. Then you have lost the page you came from and start searching for that.

The maps are, while blown...Read more

I'm at the end of my 4 months living in Jakarta. I bought this book in the states before going but when I arrived in Jakarta, i was originally very disappointed by the thinness of the jakarta section. The lack of depth was a problem throughout the book. However, I later traveled to Yogjakarta, Bandung, Bogor, Bali, Lombok, and the Gili Islands, making this book actually pretty useful. Although it doesn't have extensive information on each area, it does cover a lot of areas in a good-enough way.

However.. since the vast majority of people who come to Indonesia do not actually travel to many different places (usually just around Bali, or Java), I would recommend a book which focuses more on the place you will actually go, since you are otherwise paying for and carrying around a lot more bulk than is necessary.

(Update 2009): Last summer, i spent another 2 months in Indonesia during which I was based in Yogyakarta. I again had the great opportunity of doing a lot...Read more