A capital of thirty million that most travellers skip — a gold-tipped obelisk, Dutch Batavia, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia and street food worth the traffic
01 / 10
Central Jakarta
cultureA 132-metre marble obelisk topped with 35 kg of gold leaf, raised by Sukarno to announce that Indonesia was finished with being a colony — with a lift to a viewing deck under the flame.
02 / 10
Central Jakarta
cultureKnown locally as the Elephant Building for the bronze elephant Rama V gave it — the country's best collection of Hindu-Buddhist statuary, Dayak carving and prehistoric bronze, across seventeen thousand islands of material.
03 / 10
West Jakarta
shoppingThe old Chinatown south of Kota Tua — herbal shops, the 1650 Jin De Yuan temple under its incense smoke, and after dark the street kitchens of Gang Gloria firing up woks in the alley.
04 / 10
West Jakarta
cultureThe Dutch East India Company's old Batavia — a cobbled square of colonial buildings around the 1710 city hall, with rented bicycles in primary colours and straw hats circling it all afternoon.
05 / 10
Central Jakarta
cultureThe largest mosque in Southeast Asia and a neo-gothic Catholic cathedral facing each other across one street, deliberately, with a tunnel now dug between their car parks as a piece of national symbolism.
06 / 10
Kepulauan Seribu
leisureAn archipelago of low coral islands an hour and a half north of the harbour — white sand, snorkelling over shallow reef, and a Dutch fort on Onrust that quarantined Mecca pilgrims.
07 / 10
East Jakarta
cultureThe whole archipelago at model scale across 250 acres — a traditional house from each of the 38 provinces around a lake shaped like Indonesia, with a cable car over the top of it.
08 / 10
West Jakarta
cultureIndonesia's first serious modern-art museum — a private collection of Indonesian and international work in a converted office block, best known for a permanently installed Kusama infinity room.
09 / 10
West Jakarta
cultureSeveral hundred shadow puppets, rod puppets and masks from across Java and Bali, in a Dutch building on Fatahillah Square that stands on the site of the old Batavia church.
10 / 10
South Jakarta
leisureA hundred and forty hectares of genuine rainforest inside the city, with orangutans, Komodo dragons and a primate centre — and, at four thousand rupiah, the best-value ticket in Jakarta by a distance.