Sprawling, soaking, better than its reputation
Destinations › Asia › Jakarta
Jakarta shows almost nothing to a visitor who never leaves the mall-and-hotel corridor along Jalan Sudirman, which is why so many people write it off after two days. The city worth your time is the old Dutch port at Kota Tua, the temple lanes of Glodok, and the state monuments around Merdeka Square — all reachable on the Commuterline and MRT if you plan around the traffic rather than through it.
There is no nonstop from Toronto to Jakarta — budget for at least one stop. The YYZ nonstops that connect onward to CGK are Hong Kong (Cathay Pacific), Taipei Taoyuan (EVA Air), Seoul Incheon (Korean Air or Air Canada), Tokyo Haneda or Narita (Air Canada) and Abu Dhabi (Etihad). You arrive at Soekarno–Hatta International Airport (CGK), out in Tangerang west of the city; Terminal 3 handles most international arrivals, with further international traffic at Terminal 2. The named rail link is the Soekarno–Hatta Airport Commuter Line, now run by KAI Commuter: it goes from SHIA station via Batu Ceper, Rawa Buaya and Duri to BNI City (also signed Sudirman Baru) and on to Manggarai. SHIA station is its own building — you reach it on the free Kalayang, the Skytrain people mover linking Terminals 1, 2 and 3 with the railway station. DAMRI, the state-owned bus operator, also runs airport coaches into the city.
MRT Jakarta runs one line so far — the North–South Line, 13 stations, from Lebak Bulus to Bundaran HI; both termini carry corporate sponsor names that have changed over time, so signage and apps may not match an older map. Phase 2 north to Kota is targeted for around 2028. TransJakarta is the bus backbone: 14 BRT corridors, described as the longest such network in the world, with Mikrotrans minibuses feeding into it. KRL Commuterline (KAI Commuter) runs the Bogor, Cikarang, Rangkasbitung, Tangerang and Tanjung Priok lines and is how you get to Kota Tua. LRT Jakarta and LRT Jabodebek fill in the rest. Pay with a Jak Lingko card or a bank e-money card — Mandiri e-Money, BCA Flazz, BNI TapCash, BRIZZI or JakCard — and KAI Commuter additionally sells its own Kartu Multi Trip. Gojek and Grab cover both cars and ojek motorbike taxis; Bluebird and Silverbird are the metered taxi brands worth using.
The old Batavia city hall is now the Jakarta History Museum, facing a cobbled square that fills with rented bicycles and street performers at weekends, ringed by Dutch canals and warehouses. Take the KRL Commuterline to Jakarta Kota station — the station building itself is worth five minutes before you walk out.
A 132-metre obelisk marking independence, set in a vast public square, with a lift up to a viewing platform and a hall of history dioramas in the base. The lift carries only a handful of people at a time, so go early on a weekday or the queue becomes the entire experience.
Istiqlal is the largest mosque in Southeast Asia and stands across the road from the Catholic cathedral; the mosque has opened its parking to cathedral worshippers at Christmas, and an underground Tunnel of Friendship now links the two sites. Visitors are received outside prayer times — dress covered, expect to leave your shoes, and ask at the visitor entrance rather than walking straight in.
Jakarta's Chinatown, and the best street eating in the central city: the temple lanes around Petak Sembilan, herbal shops, and a wet market that gets going before dawn. It is a genuine walking neighbourhood in a city that mostly isn't.
The colonial-era garden suburb: wide streets, mature trees, embassies, and Taman Suropati where people play chess and practise instruments in the evening. Crucially it is one of the few central districts with continuous usable sidewalks, and it sits on the Commuterline at Cikini and Gondangdia, walking distance from Merdeka Square and the museums. The best base if you want to actually walk somewhere. Quiet after dark and the hotel stock skews older.
The high-rise spine of the city, with the big international hotels, Grand Indonesia and Plaza Indonesia malls, and the MRT running underneath at Bundaran HI. Convenient and completely frictionless, and the MRT at your door is worth a lot in this city. It is also the corridor that makes visitors write Jakarta off, because it is offices, malls and eight lanes of traffic with almost no street life. Base here for ease, but get out of it daily.
South Jakarta, on the MRT at Blok M BCA station a few stops short of the Lebak Bulus terminus, and a far more everyday Jakarta than the Thamrin corridor: covered market floors, a dense Little Tokyo of Japanese bars and restaurants around Blok M Square and the Melawai streets, and food streets that fill up at night. Good value, well connected, and where you get a sense of how the city actually lives. Not central for the historic sights — budget half an hour on the MRT each way.
The leafy expat and creative pocket further south: independent cafés, galleries, bars and the kind of restaurants people fly in for. Suits younger travellers and anyone staying a while. Two honest warnings — it has no rail connection at all, so you are entirely dependent on Grab and Gojek, and it sits low and floods in the wet season, sometimes badly enough to cut the roads.
The everyday meal and the one to learn first. A warung is a small family eatery; a warteg is the cheap canteen version. You get a plate of rice and then point at what you want from a glass case of pre-cooked dishes — rendang, fried tempeh, sambal goreng, egg in chilli sauce, vegetables — and they price it by what you took. It is the fastest way into Indonesian food and they are on every street.
The soup of the Betawi, the native people of Jakarta, and the city's own dish rather than something imported from elsewhere in the archipelago. Beef and offal in a rich broth built on coconut milk or cow's milk, served with emping crackers, fried shallots, a wedge of lime and sambal to adjust it yourself. Betawi specialists across the city do it, and the food streets around Kota Tua are a reliable hunting ground.
Betawi street food cooked in front of you on a small charcoal brazier: sticky rice and duck or chicken egg spread into a pan, then the pan is flipped over the coals so the top crisps directly in the heat. Finished with serundeng, a sweet fried coconut, and dried shrimp. Fatahillah Square in Kota Tua is the classic place to find the vendors, and it appears in force at the annual Jakarta Fair, the Pekan Raya Jakarta.
Jakarta's Chinatown, and the best concentrated street eating in the central city. The lanes around the Petak Sembilan market and the temples run to bakmi noodles, pork or chicken buns, fresh lumpia, herbal shops and old coffee stalls. The wet market is going before dawn. It is also one of the very few parts of Jakarta where wandering on foot without a destination actually works.
Take the KRL Commuterline to Jakarta Kota, the northern terminus. Give the station building itself five minutes before you walk out — it is a 1929 Art Deco landmark. Then Fatahillah Square directly outside, with the old Batavia city hall now the Jakarta History Museum, and the Wayang puppet museum on the same square.
Walk about ten minutes south from Fatahillah into Glodok and the Petak Sembilan lanes for the temples and lunch. This is a walking stretch, unusually for Jakarta, so do it before the afternoon heat peaks.
Short Grab north to Sunda Kelapa, the old harbour, where wooden pinisi schooners are still loaded and unloaded by hand along the quay. It is hot, industrial and completely unpolished, and it is the most memorable hour in Jakarta for most people who go.
Commuterline or MRT to the Merdeka Square area and go straight to Monas, the independence obelisk, at opening. The lift to the viewing platform takes only a handful of people at a time and the queue becomes the entire morning if you arrive late.
Walk across Merdeka Square to the National Museum on the western side — the best archaeological and ethnographic collection in Indonesia, and air-conditioned, which is the other reason to time it for when the heat arrives.
Istiqlal Mosque and the Catholic cathedral stand across the road from each other on the northeast corner of the square, now linked by an underground Tunnel of Friendship. Visit outside prayer times, dress covered and expect to leave your shoes. If your second day happens to be a Sunday, swap this to the morning and start instead on Jalan Sudirman and Thamrin, which close to cars for Car Free Day and fill with joggers and food stalls.
The easiest day trip out of Jakarta and the one to do if you only do one. A Dutch-era hill town south of the city, cooler and considerably wetter than the capital, built around the Kebun Raya Bogor botanical gardens — vast, old, and full of enormous trees, with the presidential palace and its deer on the lawn inside the grounds. The KRL Commuterline Bogor Line runs direct and frequently and takes roughly an hour and a half depending where you board, and it uses the same stored-value card you have been using in the city.
Reachable in well under an hour on Whoosh, the high-speed train that runs from Halim station in east Jakarta, with a connecting feeder train from Padalarang into Bandung station. Bandung sits high enough to be properly cool, and offers Dutch Art Deco architecture, a serious café and factory-outlet culture, and volcanic scenery at Tangkuban Perahu north of the city. The train is the appeal — it removes the long road slog that used to make this an overnight.
Kepulauan Seribu, a chain of small islands in the bay with beaches, snorkelling and a slower pace, and the standard escape when the city gets too much. Fast boats run from Marina Ancol; cheaper public boats leave from the Muara Angke fishing port. Pramuka and Tidung are the usual day targets. Sailings are weather-dependent and get cancelled outright in rough conditions, so treat this as the flexible day in your plan rather than the fixed one.
Be straightforward about this one: Jakarta is hard work with elderly parents or small children, and the difficulty is not the sights, it is getting between them. The good news is narrow but real. The MRT North-South Line is a modern build — air-conditioned, level boarding through platform screen doors, priority seating that people genuinely respect, and step-free access at the stations. If the places you want fall along that one corridor between Lebak Bulus and Bundaran HI, a day can be easy. It is one line and thirteen stations, though, so most days will not. Everything outside that is difficult. Sidewalks are broken, blocked by parked motorbikes and food carts, interrupted by missing drain covers, or simply absent, and pushing a stroller or a wheelchair along a normal Jakarta street is a genuine struggle rather than an inconvenience. Crossing a major road often means a pedestrian overpass with two flights of stairs and no lift. TransJakarta's bus network is excellent and extensive, but its stations sit in the middle of the road and you usually reach them by exactly those footbridges — the bus is accessible, the way in often is not. The Commuterline gets very crowded at peak and station design varies a lot by age. Two environmental factors matter more than they would elsewhere. Air quality in Jakarta is frequently poor and periodically ranks among the worst of any major city, so if anyone in your party has asthma, COPD or a heart condition, check the daily index the way you would check the weather and keep them indoors on bad days. And the traffic is genuinely punishing: a ten-kilometre trip can take an hour, so two commitments in one day across the city will exhaust an older traveller and achieve nothing. Plan fewer stops and stay longer at each. What actually works: Grab or Gojek cars door to door rather than any attempt at multi-leg public transport; the big malls — Grand Indonesia, Plaza Indonesia, Pacific Place — as air-conditioned bases with lifts, clean toilets, prayer rooms and nursing rooms; and a hotel with a pool so children have somewhere to burn off the afternoon. As a Muslim-majority country, halal is the default and prayer facilities are everywhere, which removes a planning problem for Muslim families from the GTA. One last practical point: Jakarta is eleven hours ahead of Toronto in summer and at least one connection away, so build in a recovery day at the start. Set against all of it, Indonesians are exceptionally warm towards visiting elderly people and children, and you will find strangers helping you up stairs before you have thought to ask.
The Indonesian rupiah, written Rp. Cards are fine in malls, hotels and chain restaurants; warungs, markets and street food are cash or QRIS, the national QR standard. The denominations run to a lot of zeroes and the notes look alike at a glance, so count carefully when you are tired — mixing up a ten-thousand and a hundred-thousand note is the classic new-arrival mistake. Use ATMs inside bank branches or malls rather than standalone machines on the street.
Not a traditional expectation. Mid-range restaurants and hotels almost always add a service charge plus government tax to the bill, so check the bottom before adding more. Rounding up for drivers, porters and guides is normal and appreciated, and Grab and Gojek both have a tip function in the app. Nothing at all is expected at a warung or a street cart.
Types C and F, the round two-pin European plug, at 230 volts and 50 hertz. Canadian flat blades do not fit, so bring an adapter. Your phone and laptop chargers handle 230 volts without any issue; anything from Canada that makes heat — hair dryer, curling iron, kettle — will be rated for 120 volts only and will destroy itself. Look for a 100 to 240 volt range printed on the plug pack.
Do not drink it. This is not a cautious-stomach caveat, it is a straightforward no: Jakarta's tap water is not potable and Indonesian households boil it or buy it in refillable galon bottles. Canada's official advice for Indonesia is the standard boil it, cook it, peel it or leave it, and it flags traveller's diarrhoea from contaminated water. Bottled water is cheap and sold everywhere. Ice in hotels, malls and established restaurants is commercially produced and generally fine, but skip ice from roadside carts, and use bottled water for brushing teeth if you are being careful.
Bahasa Indonesia. English is common in hotels, malls and among younger people in the business districts, and thins out fast beyond them — many drivers, warung staff and market sellers speak little or none. Have your destination written in Indonesian or pinned on the map in the app rather than trying to explain it. Download offline Indonesian in a translation app before you go. The language is phonetic and forgiving, so attempts land well; terima kasih for thank you will get you a long way.
Canada advises exercising a high degree of caution in Indonesia. Three concrete things for Jakarta. Card fraud is the standout — the official advisory describes a very high rate of credit and debit card fraud, so cover the keypad, avoid readers with anything irregular attached and check your statements. Taxis are the second: the advisory names Bluebird, Thunderbird and Express as established companies, and warns about lookalike taxis and armed robberies targeting foreign passengers, so book through one of those or through Grab or Gojek rather than flagging an unknown cab off the street. Third, demonstrations are frequent around Merdeka Square and the parliament, can turn violent at any time, and are worth walking away from rather than photographing.
The wet season runs roughly October through May, and December to March is the serious part, when average monthly rainfall clears 150 mm. This is the single thing to get right, because Jakarta does not merely get rained on, it floods: heavy rain combines with runoff from the hills upstream, high tides, limited drainage and a city that is physically subsiding, and underpasses, main roads and whole neighbourhoods go under in most wet seasons. June to September is the drier half, with July and August the driest, and that is your window. Rain still falls in every month of the year, so pack for it regardless — and if you do come in the wet season, keep a day of slack in the itinerary rather than a tight chain of bookings.
Compare the ways to get there, then build a day-by-day plan.
There is no nonstop from Toronto to Jakarta — budget for at least one stop. The YYZ nonstops that connect onward to CGK are Hong Kong (Cathay Pacific), Taipei Taoyuan (EVA Air), Seoul Incheon (Korean Air or Air Canada), Tokyo Haneda or Narita (Air Canada) and Abu Dhabi (Etihad). You arrive at Soekarno–Hatta International Airport (CGK), out in Tangerang west of the city; Terminal 3 handles most international arrivals, with further international traffic at Terminal 2. The named rail link is the Soekarno–Hatta Airport Commuter Line, now run by KAI Commuter: it goes from SHIA station via Batu Ceper, Rawa Buaya and Duri to BNI City (also signed Sudirman Baru) and on to Manggarai. SHIA station is its own building — you reach it on the free Kalayang, the Skytrain people mover linking Terminals 1, 2 and 3 with the railway station. DAMRI, the state-owned bus operator, also runs airport coaches into the city.
MRT Jakarta runs one line so far — the North–South Line, 13 stations, from Lebak Bulus to Bundaran HI; both termini carry corporate sponsor names that have changed over time, so signage and apps may not match an older map. Phase 2 north to Kota is targeted for around 2028. TransJakarta is the bus backbone: 14 BRT corridors, described as the longest such network in the world, with Mikrotrans minibuses feeding into it. KRL Commuterline (KAI Commuter) runs the Bogor, Cikarang, Rangkasbitung, Tangerang and Tanjung Priok lines and is how you get to Kota Tua. LRT Jakarta and LRT Jabodebek fill in the rest. Pay with a Jak Lingko card or a bank e-money card — Mandiri e-Money, BCA Flazz, BNI TapCash, BRIZZI or JakCard — and KAI Commuter additionally sells its own Kartu Multi Trip. Gojek and Grab cover both cars and ojek motorbike taxis; Bluebird and Silverbird are the metered taxi brands worth using.
The wet season runs roughly October through May, and December to March is the serious part, when average monthly rainfall clears 150 mm. This is the single thing to get right, because Jakarta does not merely get rained on, it floods: heavy rain combines with runoff from the hills upstream, high tides, limited drainage and a city that is physically subsiding, and underpasses, main roads and whole neighbourhoods go under in most wet seasons. June to September is the drier half, with July and August the driest, and that is your window. Rain still falls in every month of the year, so pack for it regardless — and if you do come in the wet season, keep a day of slack in the itinerary rather than a tight chain of bookings.