Bali & Java Explorer — 9 Nights

Into Java's cultural capital, a city of gamelan, batik and shadow puppetry that still has a sultan with a functioning court. The kraton quarter is the palace complex at its centre, parts of which are open and where court musicians play in the mornings. A batik workshop in the afternoon shows how the wax-resist dyeing actually works — it is a slow, exacting craft and seeing it done reframes every piece in every shop on the street outside.

Borobudur at dawn, which is the reason to be here. Built around 800 AD and the largest Buddhist monument in the world, it is a stepped pyramid of nine platforms carrying more than two and a half thousand relief panels and five hundred Buddha figures, and it was abandoned and buried under volcanic ash for centuries. Prambanan in the afternoon, thirty minutes across the plain — a Hindu complex of the same period, its central Shiva shrine 47 metres high, still being rebuilt after the 2006 earthquake.

A long drive east across Java, most of a day, through rice country and then into the volcanic foothills of the Tengger highlands. Java is one of the most densely populated places on earth and the road shows it — a continuous ribbon of villages, markets and fields, with volcanoes standing over all of it. The last part climbs to the Bromo caldera rim, where the air is thin and cold and the accommodation is simple.

Out by jeep around half past three for the Penanjakan viewpoint, where the sun comes up over the Tengger caldera — Bromo smoking in the middle of a grey sand sea with the perfect cone of Semeru, Java's highest peak, behind it. Afterwards the jeep crosses the sand sea itself and it is about 250 steps up to the crater rim, where you can look straight down into an active vent. It is near freezing before dawn and nobody brings enough layers.

East to the airport and a short flight across to Bali, arriving around the middle of the day. The change is immediate and total: Muslim Java gives way to Hindu Bali, with offerings on every doorstep and a temple at every crossroads. North into the hills to Ubud in the afternoon, where two rivers meet and the valley is loud with water. Nothing is scheduled for the evening.

The rice terraces early, before eight, when they are being worked rather than photographed — the subak irrigation system that feeds them has been run cooperatively by farmers' associations since the ninth century and is UNESCO-listed for that rather than for the view. The middle of the day belongs to the heat. The Campuhan ridge walk in the evening is a level path along a spine between two gorges and is one of the best free hours on the island.

Tirta Empul in the morning, where spring-fed bathing pools have been in continuous ritual use since 962 AD and Balinese still come to perform melukat along the row of water spouts. The afternoon is the Ubud gorge — the Monkey Forest with its several hundred macaques and three temples, or Goa Gajah, the eleventh-century elephant cave with its carved entrance, or the Ayung river for anyone who would rather raft than walk.

South out of the hills to the coast, which takes two to three hours through the Denpasar traffic and is the one genuinely tiresome transfer on the island. The Bukit peninsula at the far end is a different Bali again — dry limestone cliffs above the Indian Ocean, with the surf breaks below them and none of the green of the interior. The afternoon is the beach or the cliff-top, depending on the state of the tide.

Uluwatu in the late afternoon, a temple on a promontory a hundred metres above the sea and one of the six sea temples Balinese hold to protect the island. The macaques there steal in earnest — sunglasses and phones both. The kecak at sunset follows: around seventy men chanting in interlocking rhythm with no instruments at all, the Ramayana performed in front of them and the sun dropping into the ocean behind.

The transfer to Denpasar, which from the Bukit is around forty-five minutes. If the flight is late the morning is free — a last swim off one of the cliff beaches reached by steps, or a beach club on the west-facing shore. After nine nights across two islands, most people are content to spend it doing nothing in particular.