INDONESIA:Visitors arrive in Indonesia expecting the worst. This, after all, is a nation recovering from the most profound economic collapse of the late 20th century, according to the World Bank.
A decade ago this month, the Indonesian currency and stock market began a freefall that wiped away billions of this already poor country's wealth and ignited a political revolution.
At the peak of the crisis, the economy shrunk 17 per cent and two million jobs were being destroyed a month. For comparisons, think of the 1930s Great Depression.
The crisis was accompanied by a momentous political upheaval across this vast country's 17,000 islands that forced president Suharto from office after 32 years in power.
One of Asia's key strongmen, he ran a regime oiled by corruption and cronyism on an epic scale. At the time, Forbes magazine put the wealth of Suharto's clan at a staggering $46 billion. His family ran most of the country's big conglomerates and dominated car production, power generation, real estate, construction and the media.
Today, you can find the 86-year-old former dictator and his family living quietly in Jakarta's leafy Cendana Street.
Once, protesters gathered here to shout for his arrest. But after a decade swatting away attempts to prosecute him, he is now considered untouchable by most.
Last November, youngest son Tommy rejoined the clan less than five years after being imprisoned for contracting hitmen to murder a supreme court judge who investigated him on corruption charges.
But although the scars of the ruinous 1997-1998 era linger, the optimists are back.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, widely considered a moderate and well-meaning man, has promised to battle the twin third-world cancers of corruption and poverty.
The economy is growing at 6 per cent a year, its fastest clip since before the meltdown, and some are even proclaiming the return of one of the original Asian Tigers.
Indonesia's investment chief Muhammad Lutfi recently called the economy a rocket. Rocket it may be, but as Indonesia's new investors are shunted in air-conditioned cars from the Seokarno-Hatta Jakarta Airport to the city's plush hotels, they must studiously avert their eyes from the dispiriting sights outside their tinted windows.
The third most-polluted city on the planet is a landscape of extremes, from the gleaming new high rises in Jakarta's city centre to the pathetic crumbling houses elsewhere; from the opulence of the new suburban super-rich to the Dickensian poverty of thousands of muddy street children.
Outside the hotels where the foreign business elite gather, the city's water is undrinkable and a permanent haze chokes the air from the lungs.
Unsurprisingly, few of those who live in Jakarta are convinced that the tiger is back.
"What I see is more and more poverty and deterioration in infrastructure," says Indonesian writer and commentator Rossie Indira.
"More beggars and street children; since Suharto, people have grown poorer and poorer." And yet, the lives of some are "beyond my imagination", says Ms Indira.
"I can hardly recognise what I see on TV. Two-bedroom apartments for $200,000, way beyond the means of ordinary people, but there are people who are buying them."
Half the population lives on less than 18,700 rupiah (€1.50) a day, helping to generate nostalgia for the iron rule of Suharto.
"He was a bad man but a lot of people think we were better off then," says Ambo, a tourist guide in southern Borneo. "Now everything seems chaotic."
Analysts say the government's failure to lift more Indonesians out of poverty is also fuelling the growth of religion in a country already boasting the world's largest Muslim population: 207 million out of 235 million people.
Until now a byword for moderate Islam, dozens of local areas in Indonesia have quietly converted to Sharia in the last decade.
"We have a reputation for being a moderate society but I think Islamicisation is growing," says Ms Indira.
One sign that this conservative tide has yet to reach Indonesia's major urban centres is Jenna Jameson's bestseller How to Make Love like a Porn Star, which can be found prominently displayed in airport bookstores, close to copies of the Koran.
"I don't have a problem with it but I know some friends who would like to burn it," said one book clerk.
"If they start burning books here, then you'll know we're really in trouble."