On an idyllic holiday, questions of population become a weighty matter

In Halmahera, too, you still can easily find solitude in extensive tropical rainforests covering most of the island. Your chances of meeting indigenous people are limited, usually while traveling on the road. On the way back to where my friends and I were staying our car passed dozens of small villages.

Every family in the villages seemed to have one or two colorfully painted bungalows with a rectangular courtyard surrounded by a wooden fence in which a car or motorcycles were parked.

In every village I saw dozens of children, from toddlers to teenagers, chasing each other around, playing soccer, swimming in a river, or just sitting on porches with others enjoying the evening breeze.

When it dawned on me that children seemed to outnumber adults in a village, I imagined that this must be because a school was located nearby, an idea of which I was soon disabused.

Thinking about the demographics of all this, I soon began to feel uneasy, particularly after seeing how heavily populated Java is. I doubt that Halmahera will ever be as populous as Java, but the population growth will certainly add pressure on the environment, and on its precious ecosystem, including diverse fauna and flora.

Indonesia is a place I have grown to like traveling to, and there is little doubt I will return there, but places I have in mind to visit - West Papua, Sulawesi and the Lesser Sunda Islands - have moved up on my priority list, and the reason is my sensitivity to the issue of population growth.