It's easy to see the worst of Jakarta. Cross a road, take a breath, pay a bribe, spend a day on the toilet.

Finding the best of the city takes more effort.

At dusk, from the roof of a skyscraper, the city as a Blade Runner set: the sky a cinematic shade of orange, the ant trails of tail lights navigating through a sea of dimly-lit kampungs, towards the illuminated apartments and malls and mega screens.

Forty million people on the move.

And after dawn, before the furnace is lit, while the light's still soft and my digital thermometer reads 28.6 degrees Celsius, not 32.4.

Four degrees and a low sun make all the difference, so about three days a week I pull on my running gear and enter this gentler version of Jakarta.

Adam Harvey says he feels truly alive in this difficult, sprawling, confounding and intoxicating city. ( ABC News )

My run starts at the pond outside my home — where the other early starters are already at it.

Groups of retirees march around the pond, always smiling and nodding at me. A squad of 50-year-old men doing sit-ups and breathing exercises.

I run past the neighbourhood watch squad, who man the boomgates to this enclave and three years on still glare at me like I'm a stranger.

The unfriendliest men in Indonesia — remarkable in this city of unsolicited "hello misters" and "selamat pagis" and "mornings".

Dozens of greetings like that every day, if you counted them. But not from these guys.

A left and a right and a long straight run down an empty Jalan Cendana, the heart of power in Indonesia for 30 years.

The street of swollen mansions was home to Suharto's New Order cronies, centred around the former president's sprawling complex.

In there somewhere, Suharto's son Tommy shot his mother, an accident, supposedly, during a fight with his brother.

Past a couple of Faraway Trees that belong deep in a Borneo jungle, and then out of residential Menteng and into the city — Gondangdia train station, where the food carts have already arrived and the oil's sizzling.

The carts are called Kaki Lima, meaning five legs — two wheels, a stand and the two legs of the man pushing it, and they're probably my favourite part of the city. If I had to select top billing it'd go to the gorengan man — take a thin slice of fermented soybean, battered and fried golden to order.

You eat it on the spot, the second it's cool enough to handle. If you dare, as I do, take it with tiny bites of a small green chilli — a little fiery bullet shot onto your tongue as your teeth crunch through the salty, oily batter and into the firm tempeh.

The gorengan is too good to pass by — well, I rarely passed it by, anyway — and one of the reasons I put on about 10 kilograms during the first half of my posting.

It's why I'm running now. Down a quiet lane and then onto Monas, Jakarta's Central Park, one of the few open spaces in the city.

Monas was the focus of the enormous protests against Jakarta's Christian governor, Ahok. Three huge demonstrations over the confection that Ahok had insulted the Koran.

What he'd really done was dared to mention religion, and that was enough to tear him down.

Muslim demonstrators marching in protest against Ahok. ( AP: Achmad Ibrahim, file )

He's still in jail and what a bitter aftertaste that whole affair has left. Indonesia's most competent leader dethroned, the hardliners who challenged him emboldened and empowered, and the nation's supposedly reformist President, Jokowi, acquiescent to save his own job.

He allowed his former deputy to be thrown to the wolves in the hope they wouldn't come for him.

Past Ahok's old office, home to his replacements — a pair of half-rates happy to be the tools of Jokowi's reactionary opponents, like Prabowo Subianto, the former general and Suharto loyalist stripped of his authority two decades ago because his approach to dissent was a little too murderous.

In Indonesia, that's saying something. Prabowo's trying to decide whether the pendulum has swung back far enough to let him challenge Jokowi again next year for President.

Make a left on Jalan Thamrin, and past Sarinah Mall — Indonesia's first skyscraper and shopping mall, named after President Sukarno's favourite woman, his childhood nanny.

Jakarta bombing survivor Manfred Stoifl in Thamrin Starbucks one month after the attack. ( ABC News: Adam Harvey )

In January 2016, not long after I arrived in Indonesia, Sarinah was the original target of a team of Islamic State group-inspired terrorists.

A security guard thought they looked odd, and stopped them going inside, so they walked across the road to that icon of Western decadence, Starbucks.

One of the bombers walked past the crowd of locals ordering caramel lattes and venti green teas and stood beside an Austrian hearing aid specialist, Manfred Stoifl, who hands out thousands of free hearing aids each year to deaf poor Indonesian children, all of them Muslim, and blew himself up.

Manfred lived, but his eardrums were destroyed and he now wears his own hearing aids.

Four innocent people died, including a young dad — an office gofer called Rais Karna, who spent his workday fetching lunches and delivering mail — whose family I sought out and sat with in a far-flung kampung.

An ABC listener was so moved by their story he transferred $500 to me so I could give it to Rais' widow. More than a month's wage that made a huge difference to a grieving family.

Another left turn, and it's really too hot to run now and the traffic's gone from a torrent to a flood, but I'm two-thirds of the way there and I'm almost back in the embrace of leafy Menteng. I don't mind having to wait to cross the road because I'm really pretty knackered.

Through Menteng Park, past another clutch of those intoxicating Kaki Limas, and past a tiny school — SDN Besuki.

It's probably the best-known elementary school in the city, because in the late 1960s one of the students was a young Barack Obama.

His memory of the place is open fields and mango trees and becak — cycle rickshaws. And at 6:30am, as the kaki limas are pushed into place, and the fruit sellers and freelance trash collectors wheel their handcarts, you can almost see it.

I'm dying now, the humidity and heat combining to make breathing impossible — it's like sucking air through a wet towel.

The slight rise of Besuki feels like Heartbreak Hill, but I'm almost home now and I don't want to collapse in a heap in front of the soldiers guarding the home of the chief of the Indonesian military.

I turn a corner, back at the pond, and I stop — drenched, clear-headed, 10 kilograms lighter than I once was, feeling truly alive in this difficult, sprawling, confounding and intoxicating city.