Situated in the Special Region of Aceh the northernmost provincial-level unit of Sumatra, the more than 3.4 million Acehnese are most famous throughout the archipelago for their devotion to Islam and their militant resistance to colonial and republican rule. Renowned throughout the nineteenth century for their pepper plantations, most Acehnese were rice growers in the coastal regions in the early 1990s.

A couple of years ago West Timor used to see tourists in the range of 3 - 4.000 foreigners a year. Many of these visited the mountainous region of the Gunung Mutis protection forest. Particularly bird watchers showed a great interest to the area. In 2001 tourism dropped to less than a hundred visitors yearly due to the proximity to the East Timor border, the refugee situation and general instability in the area, and still in 2003 the difficult situation persists.

For centuries the many thousands of islands and mountainous terrain have separated groups of people in the Indonesian archipelago from each other. The result of this is huge variations in culture and languages across the nation. The exact number is not clear, but approximately 300 ethnic groups live here, which speak 365 languages and a large number of dialects.