Word: archipelago
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...decision is just the latest religious controversy to make headlines in Indonesia in recent months. About 90% of the sprawling archipelago is Muslim - the world's largest Islamic population - but significant Hindu, Christian and animist communities live in places like Bali, Sulawesi and Papua. Despite the country's constitutional commitment to freedom of faith, religious minorities have complained in recent years of a creeping Islamization that they believe has strained Indonesia's social fabric...
...town to do it. The beaches near Cartagena tend to be grimy and raucous. Escape by boat instead, from the town's historic port (you can't miss the old, touristy galleon whose three masts are visible from much of the Old Town) to the Islas del Rosario, an archipelago about 30 miles (1 hour) off the coast. The islands offer proper beaches - though none quite lives up to the postcard-perfect white stretches for which the Caribbean is famous - with snorkeling, scuba-diving and a range of restaurants. I snuck onto the Sofitel's private island for a luxurious...
...protagonist, Hidayat, is a Jakartan intellectual caught up in the Japanese occupation. The conquerors use Bahasa Indonesia, the archipelago's lingua franca, as an administrative tongue in their polyglot territory. Hidayat - drawing on Alisjahbana's actual wartime employment in occupied Indonesia's language office - is put in charge of formalizing its grammar and syntax. In the novel (as it was in life), the office is a meeting place for nationalists who seize on Japan's defeat in 1945 to declare independence and adopt Bahasa Indonesia as the new nation's official tongue...
...outside world, this tiny archipelago nation of some 300,000 people exists mostly in ads for sun-dappled luxury holidays. The Maldives lie southeast of India, a jumble of nearly 20,000 idyllic islands and azure lagoons nestled in coral atolls (a word for reef formations which came to English, fittingly, from Dhivehi, the local Maldivian tongue). Gayoom, 71, is chiefly responsible for building up the lucrative tourism sector - which has fast become the country's leading industry, ahead of its traditional fisheries. It has made Maldivians - at least statistically - the most affluent people in South Asia, and the country...
...Still, there are those who see too much opportunity to quit the country. At the Sulawesi gold-mine site, Dave Morrison has begun hiring contractors to complete facilities construction. Archipelago hopes to start digging next year. "Everyone is telling the truth from their own aspect," Morrison says of the controversy surrounding the mine. "I'm confident that things will move forward." If Indonesia's leaders did more to reinforce that confidence, perhaps the country's promise, like its gold, won't always seem out of reach...