Jakarta

I arrived in Jakarta from Yogyakarta on the afternoon train and stepped out at Gambir station into heat that was not merely hot but architectural — it pressed on you from above and rose from the concrete simultaneously and had a quality of weight that Yogyakarta’s mountain air did nothing to prepare you for. The taxi line was fifty people long. The driver who eventually took me had been driving for eleven hours and still had three more to go, and he told me about his village in West Java with the calm specificity of someone who has been looking at the same stretch of highway for years and is happy to talk about something else.

Jakarta is the largest city in Southeast Asia and is, by any reasonable measure, a city that should not function. Its roads are legendary in their dysfunction — the city operates a system of numbered traffic restrictions and still manages gridlock so total that Jakartans structure their lives around its patterns, eating dinner at ten because that is when the commute ends, running at midnight in public parks because the morning air is too thick with exhaust. And yet. The city works in the way that large, consequential cities always manage to work: through sheer accumulated energy and the coping mechanisms of millions of people who have decided that this specific chaos is worth the tradeoff.

Kota Tua — the old Dutch colonial city — is where the history lives. The Fatahillah Square dates to the seventeenth century, when this was Batavia, the commercial center of the Dutch East India Company’s vast network of extraction and trade. The red-roofed colonial warehouses have been converted into museums with varying degrees of quality, the best being the Wayang Museum with its puppet collection and the Maritime Museum in the old VOC warehouses. On weekends the square fills with day-trippers renting Dutch-style bicycles and Jakartans in elaborate traditional dress posing for photos. The whole thing is chaotic and slightly absurd and deeply enjoyable.

The food, though, is what I returned to Jakarta for a second time. Soto Betawi — a rich coconut and beef bone broth served with tendon, lung, and potato — is the city’s own claim to the national soup canon, and it is richer and more complex than the broth you get anywhere else in Java. The Pecenongan street food area operates from eight in the evening until three in the morning, a dense stretch of stalls serving everything from seafood grilled over charcoal to Betawi-style ketoprak (rice cakes, tofu, bean sprouts, peanut sauce) for the equivalent of a euro. I ate there twice and left both times feeling I had understood the city better than any museum visit had managed.

The neighborhoods south of the center — Kemang, Cipete, Blok M — hold a different Jakarta: expat bars and gallery openings and third-wave coffee shops run by young Jakartans who have done stages in Melbourne or Tokyo and brought back a certain precision of approach. The contrast between these pockets of design-conscious calm and the surrounding grid of kampung alleys and motorbike repair shops is not a contradiction. It is the city.

When to go: Jakarta has no meaningful dry season in the classic sense — the wet season (November to March) brings flooding, particularly in the low-lying northern neighborhoods. June through September is drier and marginally cooler, though 35 degrees Celsius with ninety percent humidity never exactly feels comfortable. The city is easiest to navigate on Sundays when Car Free Day closes the main boulevards from six to eleven in the morning, and you can actually walk the city center without being consumed by traffic.