Bandung
"Bandung is cool in the literal sense — a thousand meters up, the air actually works — and in the other sense that Jakartans come here to remember."
The train from Jakarta to Bandung takes three hours through landscapes that compress everything rewarding about Java: first the flat industrial sprawl of the coastal plain, then the foothills rising abruptly, then a plateau two hours in where the air changes character and the temperature drops and the paddy fields tilt at improbable angles on hillsides that should not, by rights, be farmed. Bandung itself sits at around seven hundred meters, which in a country that runs uniformly hot means the city has a quality of air that feels almost European in the evenings — cool enough for a light jacket, cool enough that the food stalls send up actual steam.
Bandung was the intellectual and cultural center of the Dutch East Indies in a way that Jakarta, then called Batavia, was too commercial to sustain. The Dutch built a second capital here — the Preanger Planters had their villas, the colonial government had its scientific institutions, and the architects of the 1920s and 1930s left behind a legacy of art deco buildings that remains, if you know where to look, largely intact. The Savoy Homann Hotel on Jalan Asia Afrika is the set piece, all curved white concrete and porthole windows, but the real pleasure is in the side streets of the Braga district, where shopfronts from the 1930s have become coffee shops and bookstores without destroying the facades that contain them.
The factory outlet culture is what most Jakartans come for — Bandung has been the center of Indonesian textile manufacturing for a century, and the surplus and seconds from the garment factories for international brands have generated an entire informal economy of factory stores and designer workshops that collectively constitute something genuinely interesting. The Dago and Riau areas hold design studios where young Bandungese are working with traditional Sundanese fabrics — the local Sunda people have their own textile tradition, distinct from Javanese batik — in ways that feel contemporary without being derivative. I spent an afternoon at one studio where the designer was working with natural indigo dye in hand-woven Sundanese cloth, producing something that bore no resemblance to either tradition it drew from.
The countryside around Bandung rewards a rental motorbike and a free day. The Tangkuban Perahu volcano — the overturned boat, named for its shape — is forty kilometers north, a drive through tea plantations and strawberry farms that takes you to the crater rim of an active but relatively docile volcano where you can walk the edge of the steaming calderas and buy fresh strawberries from vendors who have set up in the sulfur-scented fog. Further out, the Ciwidey tea estate area offers the specific pleasure of misty highland roads through tea gardens, a landscape so green it almost hurts, with warungs at intervals serving strong black Sundanese tea that costs almost nothing and tastes like the earth it came from.
The food in Bandung runs along the Sundanese tradition rather than the Javanese, which means more fresh vegetables, more sambal, and a lot less sweetness. The defining dish is karedok — raw vegetable salad with a peanut and kencur galangal dressing — served alongside sundanese staples of grilled fish, tofu, and tempeh. I ate several times at the lesehan restaurants on the hills above the city, where you sit on raised bamboo platforms, barefoot, with the city lights below and a breeze coming off the tea fields and a plate of food in front of you that costs less than a coffee in Paris.
When to go: Bandung’s highland climate is pleasant year-round, with evenings cool enough for a layer even in the dry season. The weekend crowds from Jakarta are significant from Friday afternoon through Sunday — visit midweek if you prefer the city to move at a slower pace. Tangkuban Perahu is clearest in the dry season morning hours before cloud builds up by midday.