One place that really stands out is Lake Toba in Sumatra (Indonesia) a big lake in the crater of an extinct volcano. The whole place was like a sort of beautiful tropical Switzerland.
At a hotel on the edge of the lake we had a whole suite just spitting distance from the lake - lovely to jump into! - for about £12 a night.
It was quite rural, but local people would turn the verandahs of their small houses into ‘restaurants’ if any visitor wanted to eat there. A simple local dish, which was what I liked, cost the equivalent of about 50p.
I was once rather unfairly cross with dh for wanting a bottle of wine - which cost what would have been a fortune locally - - the cook/owner of the house had to go to a neighbour to fetch one, and came back cradling it as if it were liquid gold. As he pointed out, she would make a profit on it. (I stuck to the local beer.)
We were only in the area at all because a dd was working in Aceh (Indonesia) in the post-tsunami era, otherwise I doubt we’d ever have gone there - IIRC it was quite a trek from Aceh. IIRC a taxi ride of about 4 hours cost about £30.
There were very few tourists, but I do remember a lone Russian who was absent at breakfast one morning, but reappeared later and told us he’d got lost in the ‘jungly’!
Dh had been based in Jakarta for a while some years previously, so I’d joined him twice for about a week. On one such trip we stayed at the most spectacularly beautiful place at the northern tip of Sulawesi - it wasn’t too long after all the violent trouble in Indonesia, so there were hardly any tourists - the hotel was virtually empty, it was very sad. The best and very nice room they had cost about £10 a night because the currency had devalued so much.
I well remember sitting at the end of a jetty at sunset with dh, looking at the sea and the green volcanic volcanos in the distance - (and a waiter bringing us a couple of beers!) - how we wished we could magic dds out there, it was so spectacularly gorgeous.
