BOGOR - Only an Hour from Novus Puncak

When you head up and over the highway curling around Puncak Pass toward Bogor you may want to stop off at the President’s place on the way! You will pass by a small Presidential Palace while still in Cipanas, in a colorful and flowery vast garden arrayed around this wooden but stylish palace. (Note that puncak means ‘summit’ and you can see practically forever – on a clear day, that is!)
Puncak Pass itself is high and breathtaking, and Jakarta people like to drive up just to be able to eat the local food in the cool, tall mountain setting. From there it’s all downhill, through a number of colourful villages on the way to Bogor.
Known as "Buitenzorg" (‘sans soucis’ or ‘without worry’), during the Dutch colonial era, Bogor actually lies closer to Jakarta (50 km) than it does to Bandung (120 km). The Dutch chose Bogor as the site for the first palace for their Governor General way back in 1745. Restored in 1832, the palace stands solid and elegant today, with its broad European gardens, where deer roam freely on green grass under majestically tall old trees.
Bogor is most famous for its Botanical Garden, which borders the Palace Grounds and covers an area of 87 hectares. Here is the real pride of Bogor, the ‘Kebun Raya’, or ‘Bogor Botanical Garden’, covering a beautiful 87 hectares next to the palace compound. It was founded in 1817, by the Prussian-born, Dutch government naturalist Caspar Reinwardt, with the help of two Englishmen from Kew Gardens. This institution was in the forefront of the Victorian colonial enterprise of documenting, classifying and trying to tame the natural world.

Thousands of species of plant-life from all over the world are on display, including towering age-old trees and the rarest kinds of orchids. See the original "Havea Brazilliensis" rubber tree, formerly imported from Brazil, and world's largest flower, the Rafflesia, a foul-smelling and stemless, leafless plant. When visiting this Garden, arrange for a permit to visit the neighboring Presidential Palace which belonged to the Dutch Governor General before Indonesia's independence. You can also make this a day-long visit by leaving Jakarta in the morning, sightseeing around Bogor all day, spending the night at the Novus Puncak, in the Puncak Mountains, and then it's on your way to Bandung the next day. Here again, the entire car trip will be memorable, as scenic tropical beauty all around is really astonishing.
Travelling from Jakarta, Sunda proper begins in the rain-drenched town of Bogor, 50 kilometers south of the capital, where the first big volcano, Salak, begins to rise. The area has a long history. Fifteen hundred years ago it was part of Tarumanegara, Java's first Hindu kingdom. Fifteen kilometers west of the town, near Ciampea, there are preserved the footprints of a 5th-Century king, along with a miraculously clear inscription on a great riverside boulder – ‘Batutulis Ciampea’.
Three kilometers southeast of town, another batutulis (inscribed stone) is the only surviving reminder that 15th-century Pajajaran had its capital here; but, Bogor's kings had already vanished into legend before Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff erected his country estate here in 1745.

Zoological Museum
On display in this Museum are stuffed animals placed in a diorama in glass display cases, arranged as if they were alive in their natural surroundings. It is located near the kebun raya (Bogor Botanical Gardens).

Batu-Tulis Ciaruteun (Stone Inscription)
An inscribed stone in the Sanskrit language originating in South India, a relic from the Tarumanegara kingdom, during the reign of King Purnawarman in 450 A.D. Located on the bank of the Ciaruteun river in Ciampea Village, which can be reached by driving along the 9-kilometer road from Bogor to Ciampea – then you have a nice two-kilometer hike.