It’s the world’s largest city, but you won’t see many tourists

Each Sunday the central streets of the world’s largest city are closed to its relentless traffic between 6am and 11am. It’s a once-a-week opportunity for residents to breathe easy, or at least a little easier, and to enjoy some open space in a place chronically deprived of such a thing.

This Sunday is special, however, as it’s the occasion of the urban behemoth’s 499th birthday, with the usual roar of vehicles replaced by a mass celebration complete with a raucous on-stage ceremony. You could be forgiven for presuming that the city in which I find myself is Tokyo. Or perhaps Delhi. Maybe even Cairo. Think again. This is Jakarta.

As a kind of surprise birthday gift, the United Nations crowned the Indonesian capital as the world’s newest most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. It was followed by Dhaka, Bangladesh, with almost 40 million people, and Tokyo with a comparatively meagre 33 million (presumably falling due to Japan’s rapidly declining population).

Why am I here? It’s a good question. Gertrude Stein, the American novelist, poet and playwright, could have been thinking of Jakarta, rather than Oakland, California, her childhood home, when she coined the immortal line: “There’s no there there.”

True enough, Jakarta remains one of South-East Asia’s least visited and appreciated cities, at least by Westerners, and true again, I’m literally the sole Caucasian I notice among the throng at its birthday party. But what Jakarta does offer is an authenticity largely untainted by mass tourism.

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The news of Jakarta’s newfound status as the world’s most mega megacity intrigued me, and it’s always been my policy as a traveller to give every place a go. Of course, it helped that I’d been invited to spend some time at The Legian, an upscale beachside resort in Seminyak, Bali . So, why not make a detour via the city unflatteringly nicknamed The Big Durian, after the malodorous tropical fruit banned on many a South-East Asian train line?

“I’m convinced that Jakarta will become a destination city like Bangkok in a few years,” Hans Joerg Meier, managing director of Legian Hotel Management (LHM), told me. “Visit now before everyone goes.”

Visit I do. But for me, there’s another compelling personal reason to visit.