Ten days in Java: three cities on one railway, none of them alike

Everything on the first afternoon stands around one enormous square, which makes it the only part of Jakarta you can do on foot. The obelisk in the middle is the national monument, and the queue for the lift to the observation deck is long enough that most people settle for the dioramas in the basement.

Across the road on the north-east corner, the biggest mosque in Southeast Asia faces a neo-gothic cathedral, and the two share a car park and, at religious holidays, each other's overflow. It was built that way on purpose by Sukarno, and it is the single most quietly impressive thing in the city.

North to old Batavia, where the Dutch laid out a canal town in the seventeenth century and then abandoned it as a fever trap. What is left is a cobbled square ringed by the old city hall, two museums and a cafe in a merchant's house, with bicycles for hire and a great deal of noise.

The city hall is now the history museum, and its cells underneath held Prince Diponegoro before they shipped him to Sulawesi. The puppet museum on the west side is small and much better than it sounds: shadow puppets are how Javanese stories have been told for a thousand years, and the staff will explain the difference between the leather ones and the wooden ones if you ask.

Then twenty minutes north to the old harbour, which is still working. Wooden Bugis schooners load timber at the quay by hand, exactly as they have for generations, and you can walk the length of it.

The national museum on the west side of Merdeka Square is the best single introduction to Indonesia there is: Hindu stone from Java, bronzes, textiles from a hundred islands and a treasury of gold. Give it two hours and start upstairs.

The afternoon is the strange, wonderful park the president's wife built in the 1970s, with a full-size traditional house from every province standing in a hundred hectares of garden. It sounds like a theme park and is in fact the fastest way to understand how little Java has in common with Sumba or Papua. It is well out to the south-east, so go after lunch and let the traffic settle.

The train leaves Gambir in the morning and takes most of the day, running down the north coast plain and then inland through terraced country with volcanoes standing over it. Buy a window seat on the left.

You arrive in the middle of Yogyakarta in the late afternoon with nothing to do but walk, which is exactly right. The monument at the top of the main street is the city's crossing point, and the food carts under it are an institution.

The palace opens early and closes not long after midday. Two tickets, one for the main court and one for the residence, and both worth it; if the gamelan is being played in the pavilion by the entrance, sit down and let it finish.

Lunch is gudeg, jackfruit stewed for hours in palm sugar and coconut milk until it turns brown and sweet, with rice, egg and a chilli side that is not sweet at all. Then ten minutes west to the sultan's pleasure garden, where the bathing pools are the photograph and the tunnels behind them are the reason to go.

Leave at six. The monument is an hour and a half west across the Kedu plain, it opens early, and arriving at opening rather than at ten is the difference between a temple and a crowd.

Six square platforms and three round ones carry more than two and a half thousand carved panels: the lower galleries run through the law of karma and the life of the Buddha, and the whole thing is meant to be walked clockwise, level by level, before you climb. Seventy-two Buddhas sit in perforated stupas around the top.

On the way back, two smaller temples stand on the same straight line as the great one, twenty minutes each and almost empty.

East today, and a later start, because the plain is best at the end of the afternoon. The main compound is Hindu, raised in the ninth century by the Sanjaya kings while their Buddhist neighbours were finishing Borobudur thirty-odd kilometres west.

Six temples still stand in the central court out of a couple of hundred that once filled it. The tallest is Shiva's, and the Ramayana runs in carved panels around its terrace, which is the same story danced in the open-air theatre next door on dry-season evenings.

A kilometre north, inside the same park, sits a Buddhist complex almost nobody walks to. Then up the ridge to the south for the last hour of light.

Five hours east on the morning train, through Solo and Madiun and out onto the flat. Surabaya Gubeng puts you in the middle of the city.

The afternoon has one thing in it, and it is the right one: a colonial compound of 1862 that became the Sampoerna cigarette works, and is now a museum about clove cigarettes, a gallery and a rather good cafe. There is a viewing gallery over what used to be the hand-rolling floor.

Start in Ampel, the Arab quarter in the north, where a covered lane of shops selling dates, prayer beads and perfume leads to a mosque built in 1421 by one of the nine saints who brought Islam to Java. His tomb is behind it and the courtyard is busy with pilgrims from dawn.

Then the monument to November 1945, when Surabaya refused to hand the city back to the returning Dutch and fought for three weeks. The museum under it is well done and unsentimental, with dioramas, weapons and recordings of the radio broadcast that started it.

Finish at the river, where a decommissioned Soviet-built submarine sits on dry land in the middle of town and you can walk through it end to end.

A short morning. The old Bank of Java building, put up for an institution founded in 1828, has been restored down to the teller cages and the vault, and is ten minutes from the old square.

Juanda airport is about forty minutes south of the centre outside rush hour, with direct flights to Bali, Jakarta and Singapore.