Bogor is a quick escape from Jakarta, about an hour south by train. The city is best known for its Botanical Gardens, one of the oldest and most impressive tropical gardens in the world, home to over 15,000 species of trees and plants including the giant Amorphophallus titanum (corpse flower). The Presidential Palace sits within the gardens, its lawns grazed by a famous herd of spotted deer. Bogor gets more rain than almost anywhere in Java, which keeps everything lush and green.
Beyond the gardens, the city has the Zoology Museum — one of Southeast Asia's most substantial natural history collections, with a complete blue whale skeleton as its centrepiece — the Kujang Monument celebrating Sundanese cultural identity, and a 19th-century Gothic cathedral near the garden gates. The city's Sundanese food scene is its other main draw: lighter and fresher than Javanese cooking, with plenty of raw vegetables and sambal.