Indonesian airline TransNusa adds Bali route to diving-spot Manado
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 Jakarta.
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.
TransNusa announced four other domestic routes, including from Manado to Ambon, the regional capital of Maluku, once referred to in Europe as the "Spice Islands."
The Indonesian government has ordered the building of a replacement capital city on Borneo, part of an effort to reduce overcrowding in and take its offices out of a heaving Jakarta, a vast urban area where around 25 million people live. The aim is to have the new city built by mid-century, in time for the centenary of Indonesia’s independence from Dutch colonial rule.
The government has in the meantime made a start on a vast infrastructure upgrade blueprint, with South-east Asia’s first high-speed railway, linking Jakarta to Bandung, opening in October 2023.
There are also efforts to improve air access to locations such as Labuan Bajo, the gateway to Komodo, home of the fearsome eponymous lizards, and to Silangit, the arrival point for visitors to the 100-kilometre long Lake Toba, which fills the crater left after a volcanic eruption so big it left India, thousands of miles away, covered in 15 centimetres of ash.
