Indonesia

If you search for Jakarta travel advice online, you’ll quickly find plenty of people telling you to skip it.

Many visitors use Indonesia’s capital as a transit point before heading to Bali, Yogyakarta or the islands further east. That’s a mistake.

On our recent visits to Jakarta my mission as Captain Coffee was to locate some of the best roasteries, brewers and purveyors of the dark brown elixir.

Behind the traffic and skyscrapers you’ll find incredible food, excellent coffee, fascinating history and some of the friendliest people in Indonesia.

Before booking the Hidden Jakarta Tour, we spent quite a bit of time discussing whether we actually felt comfortable doing it.

Tours that take visitors into low-income communities are controversial, and understandably so. At their worst, they can turn people’s everyday lives and difficult circumstances into a tourist attraction. We didn’t want to spend an afternoon simply walking around looking at how other people lived.

But the more we read about Hidden Jakarta, the more interested we became in how this particular tour worked. It was presented as a community-based initiative, with money from the tours supporting projects within the communities and local people involved in the organisation.

This guide is a little different. Instead of covering Bali’s most famous attractions, we want to share a few places that helped us see a different side of the island.