The Island of Java is incredibly beautiful. From the air, it appears as a patchquilt of verdant rice fields interspersed by village settlement, palm grows and stands of rubber, teak and sugar cane.
The bright green vegetation contrasts vividly with rich, red-brown soils, and everywhere the landscapes are dominated by soaring, blue grey volcanoes whose inverted cones are balding on top, forested in the middle and blanketed by rice terraces below.
Water trickles over tidy bunds and fields are through a vast network of man-made channels, finally reaching broad silt-laden rivers that meander to the sea.
This is the most fertile, the ost productive and also the most densely populated island in the world. With over 115 million people living in an area the size of England or New York State, the average population density is an amazing 850 person per square kilometer. Although the are four cities with over a million inhabitants, and many more with over 100.000, the island is still predominantly rural. Java constitutes just 7 percents of Indonesia's total mass, yet supports over 60 percent of the nation's huge population.
Many areas in the mountains and along the isolated southern shore are in fact still rather sparsely populated. Several of the island's densely packed agricultural zones, on the other hand, support more than twice the island average. In the fertile crescent around Yogyakarta, in the central of java island, for example, rural densities soar to unbelievable 2000 per square kilometer with the majority still making a living from traditional wet-rice cultivation, practiced under the most labor-intensive conditions found anywhere on earth.
Not all java possesses such luxuriance, however. The low hills along the south coast, and several areas on the north coast, are formed over non-volcanic rocks which lack this inherent fertility. Limestone regions in Central and East java are specially barren, and the plains along the north coast may be deeply flooded during the wet season yet parched in the dry season.
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