First of all, Indonesia is awesome. I love it here. If you like exotic and culture shock and adventure and roughing it, you'll love it. I guess if you love luxury you'd love it too, since everything is much cheaper including the hotels. There is no where more tropical with creatures everywhere to avoid or to check out. One of the first things you find out is the ways that you can get sick.. like not washing fruit can give you worms, etc... This freaked me out at first, but then I got used to it. My motto is 'if you live, you had fun. (If you don't live, you didn't know it anyway)'. I had to check my shoes in the morning for scorpions. My birkenstocks were a forrest of mold, and I had to throw them out after only a week or so. I had to hire someone to wash my clothes: mold and mildew grow so easily, that amateurs suck at washing their own clothes. No matter what I did they would end up stinking to high heaven after drying. The climate caused whatever bacteria was there to flourish. Nice.. But the women who worked as housekeeper were great at it, and the clothes were always fresh.
When you get off the plane, you can feel the air; it's heavy and humid like nothing you've probably ever felt. I was there to teach English in Bogor, which is a town outside of Jakarta. As soon as I got there it was Ramadan, which meant a 2 week holiday, so I shot over to Bali. Everything in Bali is colorful. There is a culture that is ancient and still practiced which is a unique sect of Hindu, unlike the rest of the country which is mostly Muslim. It's cheap- the biggest expense is getting there. I stayed in bungalo style 'hotels' which have a ceiling fan, 2 single beds, and a bathroom that is sometimes exposed partially to the outside or a garden. Every moring, they will leave a leaf and colorful flowers at your doorstep, a kind of Hindu ritual or offering. Most of them will serve you bananna pancakes in the morning as well. The cost ranged from 85 cents to $1.50. I would never book a hotel anywhere in SE Asia except maybe the first night in advance. You can always get a better deal when you get there. Indonesian cuisine is not really that special- it is bland and mostly vegetables and rice. There is a spice they use that tastes faintly like soap... rosemary? I forget. But it's still really good, I was able to eat for like $2, a 4 course meal in a really nice restaurant with one beer. There are so many things to see on the island, and any watersport. Uluwatu and other spots are traditional surfing pilgrimage spots. There are places to eat and cave like sleeping areas there, built into the cliffs called warungs. Nothing fancy. Locals run it. My favorite part of Bali is the traditional dancing which is colorful, exotic, sexy, mysterious, awesome and never got old to me. You have to see the 'monkey dance' a local specialty. The arts and crafts and jewlery are great and much cheaper than what you'd get in US. The drawbacks are in places like Kuta- people litterally attack you to get your business. I would avoid it. Sometimes on the beach you can't get a moment's peace because there are vendors. I think it's a good idea to buy and support them, then ask them to leave you alone or make a deal that they will leave you alone if you buy. Great buys, nice to help out, and you'll be happy you have nice souvenirs to show or give to people. You can get a great massage in a hut on the beach for $1.50. For an hour. Depending on how long you stay, the heat can get to you. I found that the heat in SE Asia starts to get to me after 3 mos. Another great thing to do there is a traditional Balinese wedding. Not expensive and really exotic. Even the language is exotic- sounds like something that Bugs Bunny made up! Awesome. There are no pronouns(?) and no verb tenses, so it is probably easy to learn.
So I went there by myself.. no problem meeting people. I made a good friend who is Indonesian, grew up in Australlia and is a resident of Rome. We will probably always be friends. It's easy to bond with people when you're traveling. There is a whole sub-culture of travelers, and if you are going to more than one country in SE Asia, you usually run into some of the same people again.
If you want a more kick-back experience, go to Lombok. It's Muslim, so you don't get the same kind of cultural experience, but it is relaxed and like Bali was 30 years ago. There are islands off the coast of Lombok called the Gili Islands. A lot of people visit these tiny islands- I wasn't too impressed. It is like sand/dirt, with a few huts around the perimeter that serve eggs and potatos. Talk about humid! Way more than anywhere else I've ever been. Nothing to do, a few goats in the middle of the island. Great snorkelling. Beaches not so nice. No electricity, sleep in mosquito netting. They will serve you 'magic mushrooms' in your omlette unless you specify that you want regular mushrooms- I thought that was kind of cool. I was sharing a magic mushroom omlette with some people I met one night, and I felt kinda ill. I walked back to my hut tripping and looking at the stars, which was amazing. It was dark and I had no idea where I was going- no sense of boundaries anymore, so it was hard to follow a trail. When I got to my hut and lay down, it started to storm- lightning and thunder. At that moment, I had come down with Dengue Fever, that I had picked up from a mosquito in Bogor where there was a terrible outbreak epidemic. I was sweating on that bed under the netting, unable to move. They call it bone-break fever, because it feels like someone is trying to break your bones by applying massive pressure to your body with the dull end of a butter knife. Seriously painful. I thought that it was happening because of the mushrooms- I really didn't know what was happening, I just knew I was suffering. Cool memory; I lived so I had fun.
There is a huge spectrum of different cultures in Indonesia- and it's the richest country in the world as far as natural resources. That is why the rich are so rich and the poor are so poor- other countries own and run most of it so the government is really corrupt- tons of sensorship. People who are outspoken just go 'missing'. You'll pick up a paper and it says 'so and so went missing yesterday' with on explaination. I don't know why anyone would bother to read a paper knowing that at best it's not the whole truth. Lots of student protests. Lots of military action, since I was there when Suharto was being overthrown. Lots of threats to blow up Chinese owned businesses. Apparently Indonesians hold the Chinese responsible for certain conditions... but from what I learned it is more like a stereotype. I wasn't there long enough to really understand the country, but it will always fascinate me.