Jakarta

Jakarta is thirty million people on a sinking delta, and the most honest city in Southeast Asia about what a megacity is: kampungs of tin and tile pressed against towers of glass, a Dutch old town of warehouses and canals slowly being loved back into shape, a harbour where wooden pinisi schooners still load cargo by hand as they did for the spice trade, a national monument with a gold flame on top of a marble needle, and, facing each other across one street, the largest mosque in the region and the Catholic cathedral, which lend each other their car parks on their respective holy days. The traffic — the macet — is the city's weather; the new metro is its hope; and the food, at every hour, is its reward.

The traveller starts at Kota Tua on a weekend morning, when the square fills with rented bicycles and coloured hats, sees the museums in the old town hall and drinks a coffee in the Café Batavia; walks to Sunda Kelapa for the schooners, tall and blue and hand-loaded; goes up the Monas for the flat forever of the city; sees Istiqlal, and then the cathedral, and then both from the street; walks Menteng under its trees, the leafy district where the villas are; eats at a warung, then at a hawker row, then in a mall, in that order of pleasure; and ends in SCBD or Kemang, where the city's money and its music go out at night.

The Guide's honesty: Jakarta is not an easy city and does not pretend to be — the traffic is the worst in the region, distances are hours, and the sensible traveller plans by neighbourhood and moves by MRT, ojek (motorbike taxi) or app; the floods of the rainy season are real and the north of the city is sinking; the old town is lovely on a Sunday and dusty on a Tuesday; the street food is superb and the tap water is not; and Jakarta is the door to a country of seventeen thousand islands — Bogor's botanical garden is an hour south, and everything else is a flight away. Give it two days, and it will give you back a good deal more than its reputation.