Barefoot up a mountain: no effort spared so Indonesians can vote

Carrying ballot boxes on their backs, Indonesian tribesmen climbed barefoot up a mountain in a remote part of Borneo island to ensure a small village would not miss the chance to take part in today's presidential poll.

It is just one example of the great lengths gone to in the world's biggest archipelago nation, home to some 6,000 inhabited islands and stretching about 5,150km east to west, to organise elections.

Months of painstaking preparation culminate in a week-long operation, with ballots taken in speedboats to remote islands, carried on horseback along mountain paths, and in helicopters and small planes to far-flung hamlets.

There will be some 480,000 polling stations set up for the vote across the world's third-biggest democracy. The nation boasts 190 million eligible voters, from the crowded main island of Java - where more than half of the country's inhabitants live - to mountainous eastern Papua and jungle-clad Sumatra in the west.

"Geography is always a problem in Indonesia," election commission spokesman Arief Priyo Susanto said, ahead of today's poll in which Jakarta governor Joko Widodo and ex-general Prabowo Subianto are in a tight race.

"We distribute logistics to the most remote and least accessible areas first."