HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Sebastian Hope 2001
Maps © Jillian Luff 2001
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780002571159
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007441099
Version: 2016-07-19
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
For Lisa
Contents
East Coast of Sabah and the Sulu Archipelago
West Coast of Thailand and the Mergui Archipelago (Myanmar)
Singapore, the Riau-Lingga Archipelago and the East Coast of Sumatra
I know of no place in the world more conducive to introspection than a cheap hotel room in Asia. I had seen inside a score or so by the time I reached the Malaysia Lodge in Armenian Street. It was May and Madras waited for the monsoon. In the hotel’s dormitory, one night during a power cut, I saw Bartholomew’s map of South East Asia for the first time. I was eighteen.
In other hotel rooms I have puzzled over why that moment made such an impression on me. My first response was overwhelmingly aesthetic; can a serious person reasonably assert that his motive for first visiting a region stemmed from how it looked on a map? Compared to the sub-continental lump of India, so solid, so singular, the form of South East Asia was far more exciting – the rump of Indochina, the bird-necked peninsula, the shards of land enclosing a shallow sea, volcanoes strung across the equator on a fugitive arc. It was the islands especially that drew me. From the massive – Sumatra and Borneo and New Guinea – to the tiniest spots of green, I pored over their features by candlelight.
Thirteen years and hundreds of cheap hotel rooms later, in the spring of 1996, I was in the Malay Archipelago for the fourth time, studying my third copy of Bartholomew’s map spread out on a lumpy bed in Semporna. Its significations had changed for me; it had become a document that recorded part of my personal history.
The real discovery I made on my first trip to Indonesia was the language. I struggled with the alien scripts and elusive tones of the mainland, and progressed no further than ‘hello, how much, thank you’. I could ask, ‘where is …?’ in Urdu or Thai, but I would not understand the answer. I had become illiterate once more. Indonesian Malay was a