“You’ll see,” I said. “They are dragons. And they are real.”

For as long as I could remember, I’d been fascinated by Komodo dragons, huge killer reptiles confined to a few remote islands. I knew it would take some work to get to them, so the dragons became our excuse for a little family adventure, our raison d’travel.

Ask our kids what they want to be when they grow up and they’ll say, “Jungle explorer.” So last winter my wife, Courtenay, and I thought: Let’s do that for a vacation. Let’s explore some jungles. Let’s pack as many different stunning, pristine natural environments into one two-week trip as possible and check in on the state of our world, starting with the dragons.

Of course, I got the dragon bit totally wrong and we’d soon learn that the other wildlife we’d encounter — the orangutans, the scops owls, the unjustly athletic gibbons and hypnotizing manta rays — was infinitely more interesting.

But perhaps the greatest discovery we made was within our own complicated species. We found, pretty easily, without hiring a tour company, and just by thumbing through old-fashioned guidebooks augmented by Google searches, a network of one-man conservationist organizations who knew every nook and cranny of the terrain we wanted to explore. I’m sure they’re out there in each country, but I can say with certainty that Indonesia offers an inspiring coterie of hard-working marine guides, bird guides, forest experts and other self-educated naturalists. They were all enthusiastic about showing off their slice of the world — sometimes, perhaps a little too enthusiastic.

It’s easy to see how they could get carried away. With its 18,000 islands strung across the Equator, many with their own unique plants and animals, separated by relatively short distances, Indonesia is a naturalist’s promised land. Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian explorer who came up with the theory of natural selection independent of Charles Darwin, voyaged around here, filling his notebooks as he traveled isle to isle. Wallace didn’t come from money like Darwin, so he had to finance his travels by shooting and skinning orangutans and collecting specimens for museum cases. He loved beetles and came back to England with more than 80,000.