Jakarta happens to be located in Java, but it is hardly of Java. The contrast between the metropolitan capital and the surrounding province is dramatic. For, although West Java contains some big cities of its own, its soul is rural. The least densely populated province of the island, it offers unrivaled scenery, extensive nature reserves and refreshing mountain weather, all within a few hours of Jakarta's confusion. Its prosperity, friendly people and excellent transportation facilities make it one of the most genuinely relaxing parts of rural Indonesia in which to travel. West Java also offers much that is of cultural and historical interest.


West Java was first known to Europe as Sunda - a land, kingdom, language and people all distinct from Java. The l6th-century Portuguese were so impressed by this country that they misapplied its name not only to the island of Java, but to the whole archipelago; to this day, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and Celebes are still known collectively as the "Greater Sunda Islands." The first known kingdom on Java, the Hindu state of Tarumanegara, flourished on the north coastal plain of West Java in the 5th century. A millenium later, the first Portuguese ships to weigh anchor here were welcomed by another great Hindu kingdom, Pajajaran, a contemporary and rival of the great East Javanese Majapahit. Since 1433, the capital had been at an inland location, Pakuan, today's Bogor, where Dutch governors- general would later reside. However, in 1522, when Pajajaran concluded an alliance with Portuguese Goa, it was still master of the north coast, including the lucrative ports of Banten and Sunda Kelapa (now Jakarta). The Portuguese were to help protect the Hindu power against Islam's rapid westward expansion along the coast. However, when they returned in 1527, both ports had been captured by Muslims and made vassals of the young sultanate of Demak, 400 kilometers to the east. Landlocked, Pajajaran declined, and 50 years later its capital was conquered by Banten.

While Javanese speakers flocked to the booming coastlands, and Banten became a great trading and military power, the Sundanese retreated to the mountains and high plateau in the south and developed a rural folk culture without cities or courts. In this condition, and so close to Batavia, what now became known as the "Sundalands" were easy prey for the VOC; by 1684, the entire Sundanese-speaking area was under direct Dutch control, while the coastal sultanates of Banten and Cirebon retained nominal independence into the 19th century. In due course, the Sundanese too were Islamized and indeed, became known as purer and stricter Muslims than their Central Javanese neighbours. However, in language, customs and art, and in their own minds, the Sundanese never assimilated with the outgrowth of ethnic Java which had cut them off from the Java Sea.

So, today there are two West Javas; the Javanized, maritime north coast and the Sundanese interior. This human division coincides closely with the most obvious physical one; the north is flat and featureless, a hot, wet, 50 kilometer-wide littoral plain, advancing a little further seawards each year, laden with the rice which feeds Jakarta's masses, while Sunda proper is a towering, stately mass of welded volcanoes - the Priangan, or Parahyangan, "Abode of the Gods," clothed in tea plantations and virgin forest, shrouded in cloud, falling steeply into the sea on the wave-lashed, portless south coast.
The broken island of Krakatau, out in the Sunda Strait, is an outlier; many of Priangan's other volcanoes are still active. At Cianjur, Bandung, Garut and Tasikmalaya, the mountains part to cradle high depressions which are meticulously terraced to grow fragrant rice. To the east, the Priangan fades imperceptibly into the more intermittent volcanic terrain of Central Java.

Ninety kilometers west of Jakarta, via Serang, is the fishing village of Banten, known to history as Bantam. Looking at this quiet little place today, it is hard to believe that for a century this was the greatest trading port on Java; the city which Batavia itself was founded to challenge. Wrested from Hindu control in the 1520s, by Gunungjati of Demak, Banten became an independent Muslim sultanate which grew rich on the trade of the Sunda Strait and the pepper of Lampung. Banten attracted English, French and Danish "factories" before a civil war presented the VOC with the opportunity to intervene and end its glory forever in 1682.

The village is dominated by the tiered meru roof of the l6th-century Mesjid Agung, one of Java's oldest mosques and a good example of transitional Hindu Islamic architecture. Its peculiar pagodalike minaret is said to be the work of a Chinese Muslim, and the adjacent shuttered building that of a Dutch Muslim; reflections of early-Javan Islam's ecclectic interpretations. South of the alun-alun (central square) are the remains of two large palaces, the Pakuwonan and the Istana Kaibon. A little further on is the tomb of the third king, Maulana Yusuf, who ruled in the 1570s. Northwest of these remnants of Banten's greatness is a monument to its fall - the ruins of Fort Speelwijk, constructed in 1682 to keep the city safety under the Dutch heel. Built overlooking the sea, the fort is now some 200 meters inland; coastal silting has played its part in the decline of Banten. Since 1985, local archaeological finds have been displayed in the Banten Site Museum on JI. Mesjid Banten Lama.

For most visitors, the most important attractions of Java's far west are natural. The national park at Ujung Kulon ("West End") is one of Indonesia's prime nature reserves, and a fine example of successful state action to preserve wildlife. This unsullied wilderness shelters hornbill, banteng (wild cattle) and crocodile, as well as the only breeding population of Javan rhinoceros to survive Java's long transformation fronijungle to market garden. Krakatau, 40 kilometers out in the Sunda Strait, is the remains of a great volcano which blew itself to pieces in 1883, in one of the greatest explosions ever recorded. Its scarred, primordial landscapes are reached by sea from Labuhan, which is also the usual jumping off point for Ujung Kulon. Along the coast north of Labuhan are West Java's finest and safest beaches, with accommodations in Carita, Anyer Kidul and Florida Beach (near Merak, the terminal for the ferry to Sumatra).

Travelling from Jakarta, Sunda proper begins in the rain-drenched town of Bogor, 50 kilometers south of the capital, where the first big volcano, Salak, begins to rise. The area has a long history of civilization. Fifteen hundred years ago it was part of Tarumanegara, Java's first Hindu kingdom. Fifteen kilometers west of the town, near Ciampea, the footprints of a 5th-century king and a miraculously clear inscription adorn the great riverside boulder of Batutulis Ciampea. Three kilometers southeast of town, another batutulis (inscribed stone) is the only surviving reminder that 15th-century Pajajaran had its capital here; but, Bogor's kings had already vanished into legend before Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff founded a country estate here in 1745. Bogor began its rise to renown as Buitenzorg ("Carefree"), retreat and later official residence of the governor-general of Dutch East India. The present Istana Bogor (Bogor Palace), elegant and white on its undulating green lawns, dates from 1856, and has seen many a lavish gathering of both Batavia's and Jakarta's elite. Its pre-war furnishings were looted by the Japanese; the present contents are owed to the acquisitive zeal of the late President Sukarno and the generosity of his many benefactors. They include paintings and sculptures, erotic and otherwise, by many of Indonesia's foremost artists. Sukarno was under de facto house arrest here from 1967 until his death in 1970.
The real pride of Bogor is the Kebun Raya, or Bogor Botanical Garden, which covers a beautiful 87 hectares next to the palace compound. It was founded in 1817, by the Prussian-bom, Dutch government naturalist Caspar Reinwardt, with the help of two Englishmen from Kew Gardens. This institution was in the forefront of the Victorian colonial enterprise of documenting, classifying, taming