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Exploring Indonesia – Vlog

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Sam Kolder’s camera finds a version of Indonesia that never makes it onto a postcard.

“Exploring Indonesia – Vlog,” posted to Sam Kolder’s YouTube channel ‘kold,’ pushes past Bali’s beach clubs and rice terraces to chase drone shots and stunts across the rest of the archipelago. Kolder shot and produced the piece alongside fellow filmmaker Bryn North, who also handled the edit. The result is one of the more studied entries in Kolder’s catalog — a travel vlog that filmmaking communities still pick apart frame by frame for how it moves.

• The vlog was co-filmed by Sam Kolder and Bryn North, with North handling the edit.
• Kolder performs one of his signature handstands on the ridgeline of Padar Island inside Komodo National Park, captured with sweeping drone footage.
• The video is regularly dissected in dedicated breakdown videos — including an “Editor BREAKDOWN” and a “How to Travel VLOG?” analysis — for its speed ramps, transitions, and sound design.

Skipping the Bali Script

Bali dominates most Indonesia travel content — surf breaks in Canggu, temples in Ubud, infinity pools overlooking rice paddies. Kolder and North built their vlog around the idea of stepping past that itinerary entirely, pointing their cameras at Komodo National Park and other stretches of the archipelago that rarely headline a travel vlog. It’s the same instinct that drives creators toward places like the tree-dwelling communities of Papua rather than another Ubud sunset — Indonesia is bigger than its most photographed island, and the vlog treats that as the whole point.

That doesn’t mean Bali gets ignored across Kolder’s broader body of work; his footage of Bali’s bamboo treehouse architecture shows up elsewhere in the same cinematic style. But “Exploring Indonesia” specifically earns its title by getting off that beaten path.

The Padar Island Handstand

The vlog’s most talked-about moment is small in duration but large in nerve: Kolder executing one of his trademark handstands on the exposed hilltop of Padar Island, inside Komodo National Park, with the bay’s turquoise inlets framed below him and a drone tracking the shot from above. It’s the kind of stunt that’s become a visual signature across Kolder’s travel work — a physical flourish dropped into a scenic viewpoint purely for the camera.

Caution: Do Not Try This Stunt At Home — Welcome to Indonesia.

Wonderful Indonesia’s tourism board picked up the clip under that exact warning when sharing the footage, underscoring how much the moment stood out even to people who spend their time promoting the country’s scenery for a living.

Editors Frequently Revisit The Work

What separates this vlog from the flood of drone-and-GoPro travel content on YouTube is how closely editors study its construction. A dedicated “Editor BREAKDOWN of SAM KOLDER’S ‘Exploring Indonesia – Vlog'” walks through North’s cutting choices shot by shot, and a separate “How to Travel VLOG? (Sam Kolder analysis)” video treats the piece as a template for the genre. Both zero in on the same elements: the speed ramps that snap between real-time and slow motion mid-clip, the transitions that hide cuts inside camera movement, and sound design that’s layered to hit on the beat rather than just underneath it.

That level of scrutiny is unusual for a travel vlog. Most get watched once for the destination; this one gets watched repeatedly for the craft, which is a big part of why it’s held up as one of the entries that helped define what a modern cinematic YouTube travel vlog is supposed to look like.

Placement Within The Kolder Catalog

Kolder built his name on exactly this formula — dense, kinetic edits of far-flung locations that feel more like a short film than a vacation diary. “Exploring Indonesia” slots into that catalog as one of the pieces creators point to when they’re trying to explain the style to someone unfamiliar with it, alongside his other travel-heavy uploads. For viewers who then go looking for the country itself, the archipelago’s more famous landmark — covered in a separate look at Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple — is a reminder of how much ground Indonesia covers beyond whatever island a given vlog happens to land on.

North’s edit still gets pulled up in breakdown videos years after it first uploaded, which is the real measure of whether a travel vlog like this one holds up: not how many views it pulled on day one, but whether other editors are still slowing it down frame by frame to figure out how the cut was built.