An hour from Jakarta, Bogor offers outdoor activities and botanical gardens

overhead, and dangling pots burst with pink and purple petals. Outside, enormous lily pads float like dinner plates on reflective ponds, shoulder-high buttress roots stabilise towering tualang trees, and a ceiling of green harbours tropical birds and flying foxes.

It's hard to imagine that Indonesia's smog-choked capital Jakarta is so close to this 80-hectare paradise. The only significant stretch of green space within 60 kilometres of Jakarta's central business district, these gardens form the centrepiece of Bogor city, and have provided a green lung for urbanites since the 18th century.

Today, the city may not be the provincial sanctuary it once was. But its easy outdoor getaways, and the botanical gardens at its heart, make it a superb base for a city break. The gardens attract tourists and locals alike, who come to laze on the lawns, step inside the orchid house or study the site's more than 1,500 species of plants. You might even be lucky enough to see the world's largest single flower - the Rafflesia - which blooms only once a year for a mere three days.

The gardens were established by Dutch colonists in the 1740s and are now one of Asia's most respected centres for horticultural research. The Dutch Governor General Gustaaf Willem Baron van Imhoff built himself a bolt-hole in the grounds, a building which is now the Indonesian president's summer palace.

Bogor city began life as a series of agricultural settlements in the fertile foothills of some active volcanoes. The fresh air and agricultural richness of the region impressed the Dutch colonists who, looking for a cool, rural retreat, named it Buitenzorg, meaning "free of care", in 1746.