Surabaya and the Asia That No Longer Exists

I went to Surabaya in September 2025 partly because almost nobody goes to Surabaya. The second-largest city in Indonesia, major port, industrial hub — not on the tourist circuit in the way that Bali and Yogyakarta are, not fashionable, not particularly photogenic in the way that algorithmically successful destinations are photogenic. People go to Bali. People go to Surabaya because they have business there, or because they live there, or because they are looking for the kind of Indonesia that has not been optimised for visitors.

I am that third kind of traveller. I have been that kind for as long as I have been travelling.

The Asia I Found Before Tourism Found It

I need to be careful here not to be the kind of person who resents other people’s travel. That is not the point. But there is something true that needs saying about what Asia was like before the infrastructure of mass tourism transformed it, and what has been lost alongside what has been gained.

In 2009 to 2011, I went to Myanmar — then Burma — when there were no ATMs and you had to bring cash like a drug dealer crossing a border. You carried hundred-dollar bills, pristine and unfolded, because crumpled notes were refused. Bagan — the plain of 2,200 Buddhist temples spread across 40 square kilometres — had almost no tourists. You could walk between the temples in silence. You could climb one at sunrise and see nothing in any direction except other temples and the Irrawaddy River and the mountains beyond. It was one of the most beautiful things I have seen anywhere. I loved it with an intensity that surprises me still when I think about it.

In 2005, I went to Angkor Wat when you could still be almost alone in the temples at sunrise. By 2012, there were five times as many tourists. The experience was still magnificent — Angkor Wat does not stop being Angkor Wat because of crowds — but the silence was gone.

When I lived in China from 2002 to 2004, I went to villages where children touched me because a foreigner was rare enough to be remarkable, possibly lucky. Those villages are connected to everything now. The children’s children have smartphones and probably know more about the world than I did at their age.

What Surabaya Is

Surabaya is a city of three million people that functions as a city rather than a tourism product. The old Dutch colonial quarter has faded glory — the buildings are magnificent and largely unmaintained, which gives them an atmosphere that perfectly maintained heritage districts sometimes lack. The Arab Quarter near Ampel Mosque is a genuine neighbourhood where people live and work and worship rather than a recreation of one.

The food is exceptional and almost entirely unknown to the international traveller. Rawon — a dark, rich beef soup made with black kluwek nuts, served with rice and fermented shrimp paste — is one of the great soups of Southeast Asia and is Surabayan in origin. Lontong balap, rujak cingur, tahu tek — a city’s worth of dishes that do not appear on any “best food in Asia” list because no international food media has bothered to send anyone to Surabaya.

I ate extremely well. I paid almost nothing. I was the only obvious foreigner in every restaurant.

The Traveller’s Paradox

There is a paradox at the heart of the kind of travel I have always sought. The places I love most are the ones that have not yet been discovered. But the act of writing about them — of recommending them, of sharing photographs — is itself part of the process that transforms them. I helped kill the secret of places I loved by loving them too visibly.

I do not think the answer is silence. The answer, I think, is honesty about what we are doing when we travel and what we are willing to accept as the terms. We go to places. We consume them, transform them, sometimes damage them, sometimes contribute to them. The best we can do is travel with attention — to pay for things fairly, to treat the places and people we encounter as ends rather than means, to understand that our presence has consequences.

I went to Surabaya because I wanted to find Asia that had not been fully processed into a product for people like me. I found some of it. It will not last. But for a few days in September, the rawon was extraordinary and I was more or less alone in the city that made it, and that was enough.