Jakarta

Jakarta is Indonesia's capital and largest city, a metropolitan region of roughly 30 million people that most travellers pass through rather than stay in. It is a working megacity of government, banking, industry and commuting, not a beach holiday, and it is worth arriving with that expectation. It also remains the formal capital: the move to the new capital Nusantara in Kalimantan takes legal effect only once the president issues the transfer decree, which had not happened as of July 2026. Jakarta rewards curiosity and punishes a rushed sightseeing list. The pleasures are the food, the museums, a colonial-era old town and the sheer scale of the place.

The traffic is genuinely severe, and the answer is to use the rail and bus network rather than sitting in a car. The MRT's north-south line, open since 2019, runs beneath the main Sudirman corridor between Lebak Bulus and Bundaran HI: clean, air-conditioned and fast, with an extension north under construction. TransJakarta operates a very large bus rapid transit network on dedicated lanes, cheap and far quicker than a taxi at rush hour. Commuter rail covers the wider region, and an airport train links Soekarno-Hatta to the centre. Gojek and Grab motorbike taxis filter through jams and are how a lot of people actually cross town at 5pm.

Most of what there is to see sits in two clusters: the old Dutch town in the north and Merdeka Square in the centre. Kota Tua is the colonial-era quarter around a wide cobbled square, with the Jakarta History Museum in the old city hall and the old harbour at Sunda Kelapa nearby, where wooden schooners still load by hand. In the centre, Monas, the National Monument, is the obelisk on Merdeka Square with an observation deck at the top. The National Museum on the square's west side reopened in October 2024 after a 2023 fire and its restoration has continued in phases, so check what is open before you go.

The food is the strongest single reason to give Jakarta a day. The city draws cooking from across the archipelago, so Padang food from Sumatra, Manado dishes from Sulawesi, Javanese street food and Chinese-Indonesian cooking are all here, at a depth that the tourist strips in Bali rarely match and at a fraction of the price. Street stalls, night markets, mall food courts and serious sit-down restaurants all work, and eating well costs very little. If you only try one thing, make it a Padang rice plate, where a stack of small dishes arrives and you pay for what you touch.

Jakarta's malls are social infrastructure rather than just shops, and once you accept that, the city makes more sense. Heat and humidity are constant, pavements are inconsistent, and rain arrives hard, so air-conditioned malls act as the city's public living rooms: people meet, eat, work and take their children there for the afternoon. Jakarta suits travellers with a spare day between flights, anyone curious about how the country actually runs, and business visitors. It is a poor fit if you want walkable sightseeing or a slow holiday, and there is no shame in treating it as a transit stop on the way to Yogyakarta or Bali.

Jakarta is among the Indonesian cities where Telkomsel 5G is live, and Goodbars runs on Telkomsel, the network with the widest reach in the country. Coverage across the metropolitan area is dense and fast, which matters more here than in most places: ride-hailing, transit apps, live traffic and QR payments all assume you are online, and losing signal mid-journey in this city is its own kind of misery. As an eSIM it installs before you fly and switches on when you land, so you leave Soekarno-Hatta already connected rather than queuing at a SIM counter with a transfer to catch. Heavy map and ride-hailing use adds up quickly, so the 20GB plan is the safer pick.