Australian dollars to Indonesian rupiah

The lowdown on the Indonesian rupiah

If you’re going to be a millionaire anywhere, Indonesia is the place. The currency has so many zeros on the end that you’ll either feel rich or like you just really need a calculator. There’s even talk that the Indonesian government might rethink the rupiah to get rid of some of those digits.

All those zeros can make it easy to mix up your banknotes – the ones for 10,000 and 100,000 rupiah don’t have commas between the numbers, so make sure you get them right. Even the highest banknotes (for 100,000 rupiah) aren’t worth much more than ten bucks, so get used to handing over a lot of them. You’ll find most people use cash and some places won’t let you pay by card anyway.

The word rupiah comes from the Sanskrit for silver, and you might hear the locals call their currency perak, which also means silver in Indonesian. There aren’t many coins around though, because they’re not worth much, so prices get rounded up a lot.