“Jakarta, the city you’ll never love.”

The two friends I was travelling with and I were on a flight to…well – Jakarta – as we read this sentence. And having known nothing of it besides the fact that it was Indonesia’s capital and so the best place to sort the necessary logistics of our next travel plans – like obtaining visas and being able to take onward international flights – we had enthusiastically jumped to its section of the Lonely Planet guide to read about what else we could experience there.

We giggled at the underwhelming opener. A capital city which even the travel guide – a book designed to encourage tourism – had given up on, with what was basically a politely worded version of “CBA” before it even started. When does that ever even happen? Poor old Jakarta.

That was 2010. I spent several weeks there waiting for a visa to be processed at the embassy and have been back three times since, most recently in March of this year. Jakarta is a place that has – in spite of its ‘unloveable’ ways – become very dear to me. It was back then, and it remains so now.

A pretty place it most definitely is not. It consistently ranks among the highest of the world’s most polluted cities, both in the air and in the water, and when you combine the scents of that with those of the durian fruit – famed for its pungent smell and sold in massive batches down every street – you get an aroma unlike anywhere else. It’s a unique blend of exhaust fumes, heat, sweat and – owing to the durian – stale cheese and nappies. With a bit of South East Asian lemongrass thrown in for good measure.

As soon as I exited the city’s Soekarno Hatta airport in March this year, that very same smell enveloped me like an old friend offering a warm embrace (literally warm, we’re only a little below the Equator). And it made me smile and feel like I had walked back into an old home, because I had in a way.

Jakarta, and Indonesia generally, has been home to an annexed piece of my heart for fifteen years. I don’t often get to tap into it these days, but when I do, it’s still there, and – unlike an old watch in a drawer – it’s still beating like it’s never stopped, and that’s never going to change. A lot of people who I care about a great deal live there, and meeting up with them again for the first time in many years was incredibly special. What the city might lack in terms of organised infrastructure and beautiful aesthetics, it makes up for in the warmth and wonderfulness of its humans, and I much prefer things that way round.

I had chosen to stay at the Sparks Hotel, which was situated in a bustling neighbourhood known as ‘Mangga Besar’ (‘big mango’). Now I do enjoy mangoes, and so I’d be especially delighted to come across a big one, but that wasn’t the reason I chose to stay here (which is for the best since I didn’t even see any of the famed trees that apparently used to rule this ‘hood and gave it its name).

I’d chosen Sparks because it was the same hotel I stayed in for three weeks 15 years ago, and I was intrigued to see how much or how little it had changed. I also recalled it had an epic swimming pool on a mezzanine near the roof, so that you could cool yourself down whilst being even closer to the grey, traffic-choked clouds than you would be if it were on the ground.

Walking in jet-lagged, and stale from the sweltering, evening heat to a brightly lit lobby with its overwhelming smell of lemongrass felt like deja vu. It was 2025, but it could have very easily been 2010. The hotel had recently undergone a general refurbishment, and the new restaurant area behind the reception desk looked very inviting. Yet when I stepped into the elevator to get to my room, I recognised the same interior design, the same buttons, and the same sign prohibiting the presence of durian fruit that I had seen fifteen years ago, only a lot more worn and faded now.

The rooms themselves were also just the same. The same suitcase rack – more dimpled from all the heavy luggage dumped on it over time – the same yellowing plastic kettle, the same night stand, the same clunky safe in the wardrobe, the same feeble hairdryer. And the same view from the windows…

I’d spent many an evening in August 2010 gazing out of these windows. I had been on a shoestring budget and so had to spend a lot of time confined to the hotel, where I didn’t need to spend any more money. I remember explicitly at the time noticing the neon yellow lights of the Grand Paragon Hotel in the distance. It was one of the main (only) focal points of the view, and I remember staring at it once whilst making a very expensive phone call to the Student Loans Company in Scotland. They had sent a letter to my parents’ whilst I was away asking me why I wasn’t making any payments, and demanded I get in touch to explain. I remember this call for two reasons, the first being that it was very lengthy and I was squirming the entire time about how much it was costing me, and the second because the adviser made a snippy comment about the fact I was travelling and not working. I was so annoyed by her judgemental tone, that it made me want to stay travelling and not work. Ever.

In March 2025, I looked out again at the Grand Paragon – same neon yellow sign – and internally responded to my 24 year old self, the one who’d just ended the call with the SLC and had vowed to bum about travelling forever just to make a point to the moodywomaninScotland:

“Bold plans there, Sophie, but in two months’ time you’ll be catching a bus at 7am every morning to deal with customer complaints for 9 hours a day. In Hemel Hempstead.” 

Moody SLC woman would win in the end, it would turn out. Damn her, although I also partly cringed at the brashness and naivety of my younger self for thinking I could spend my whole life avoiding reality and not paying back my student loan. Selling coconuts on Sumatran beaches to get by, that had been my grand plan. Instead, I’d soon be desperately trying to appease customers who were angry that the brown boots they’d ordered were missing from their delivery.

The longer I looked out of the window, the more the vivid memories came sweeping back. Things I hadn’t thought about since that time – the clothes in my suitcase – which I wouldn’t wear now. My old Nokia ringtone. The content of Skype conversations that took place at the table next to me each evening. How I spent a lot of that time missing the experience and people I’d just met in West Sumatra, and the crispy prawns I’d enjoyed once from room service. Visual memory recall does some incredible things. I almost felt like I was still my 24 year old self, only more grey, creased and knackered by life – but still with a fondness for Indonesian satay and Bintang beer – and maybe that’s the closest to time travel we can get.

The longer I stayed in Jakarta this year, at 39, the more I wondered how the younger me had ever managed to navigate its crazy and chaotic infrastructure. The traffic and sprawling neighbourhoods that blend one into the other, and the other, and the next. No Google maps, no smartphones, no mobile WiFi, and certainly no GoJek (Indonesian Uber, but with motorcycles instead of cars).

Even with all of these digital additions now to assist, Jakarta still feels like an intense and sometimes intimidating place. One which never sleeps and which keeps you on your toes – literally – since the pavements are speckled with gaps that could take you plunging right down for a bath in the sewers if you mis-step.

Yet somehow, it all just works. There’s always a way. You always get to where you need to on time, even when the odds feel stacked against you, even when the traffic is stagnant and the clock ticks down. The train will depart from Gambir Station in 45 minutes, and that’s 60 minutes away, but you can feel assured that you’ll be on that train. Somehow.

I needed a new set of headphones to enjoy music on the 6 hour train journey to Yogyakarta that followed, and somehow they were the first thing I spotted on sale at the station. I needed to obtain a refund for another ticket and expected a battle at the ticketing office, and somehow I was met with a welcome “Here you go” as the Rupiah notes were handed over. A friend wanted to meet me to say goodbye and he was miles away with minutes to spare, yet somehow I was boarding the train with the bag of travel snacks he’d just bought for me in what felt like just thirty seconds later.

And if you need help, they’ll bend over backwards to help you, even if the conversation is a mixture of the most basic English and Bahasa. And it somehow feels easier and more straightforward than it does at home, suggesting that sometimes it’s better to just roll with the chaos rather than to stress and try and deconstruct the problem to find a logical solution that may or may not even work.

One evening this year, I booked a motorcycle taxi to take me back from my friend’s house to the Sparks Hotel, a 30 minute journey which cost the equivalent of one pound. As the motorcycle – driven by a guy wearing flip-flops and no helmet – perilously weaved between the cars on the freeway underneath the night sky, I realised I was doing something I don’t think I’d have the courage to do at home. It would feel too scary to sit on a motorcycle there, even though the roads are safer and driving standards more uniform. I wondered why that was, and then that same thought hit me again: sometimes it really does take more mental energy to try and coordinate the chaos than to just sit back and surrender to it.

Indonesian windows offer many alternative views.

I thought back to those now infamous words:

“The city you’ll never love”

But, I do. And I always will.

And not just for the people.