There are a variety of hiking trails, including a three-hour medium-grade rainforest trek that follows fruit trails and droppings on the forest floor to the orangutans' nesting spot, high in the trees. Like all national parks in Indonesia, you must hire a registered guide to visit. Some 2500 Central Bornean orangutans live in the park, and you'll also find sun bears, white-handed gibbons, doe-eyed Horsfield's tarsiers, and hilariously overactive proboscis monkeys. In the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan, this remote 108,000-hectare (417-sq-mile) park is flanked by the Gunung Panti mountains, and it has a concentrated wildlife corridor where you're virtually guaranteed to spot orangutans in their wild habitat.

Gunung Palung National Park, West Kalimantan From the edge, you can peek inside the bellows of an active volcano – a mass of bubbling liquid, sulfur, and smoke. Morning temperatures can be as low as 4☌ (39☏), so make sure you bring warm gloves, a woolly hat, and a jacket, or hire a jacket there for around US$2. After crossing the sand sea by horseback, the final push is up 250 stairs to the Mt Bromo crater rim. On the way up, you'll meet local Tengger horsemen, clad in traditional warm cloth to ward off the chill. After dawn, travelers continue on to the crater rim by 4WD, through a lunar-like landscape known as the sand sea.Īdventurous hikers can go on foot, an almost surreal crossing through the stark, sweeping plain. You'll need to leave your hotel at 3:30am to catch the sunrise from Mt Bromo, the island's most famous active volcano, but it’s worth it to see daybreak over the Tengger Massif range and the mighty Mt Semeru, 3676m (2.3 miles) high.

It's worth getting up early to see daybreak over Mt Bromo and the mighty 3676m-high Mt Semeru © Martin Puddy / Getty Images Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, East Javaīromo Tengger Semeru National Park rewards early birds.

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