The Golden Chersonese
by prudence on 31-Mar-2010
I've just finished reading "The Golden Chersonese: A 19th-century Englishwoman's travels in Singapore and the Malay Peninsula" by Isabella Bird. Fascinating stuff.
She was travelling at the beginning of 1879, and it's amazing how little was known at that time about the area she describes, and how few people lived there. Her account is full of old colonial attitudes, of course, which make you really wince at times (but then it's always sobering to wonder what in our writings will make people really wince in 130 years' time -- assuming they're still around to be read...) And the beginnings of contemporary Malaysia's ethnicity problems are already very clear, as she describes the migrant population increasing by leaps and bounds.
But you have to admire her all the same. She was a game old Bird was Isabella, not dismayed by having to walk four miles through a quagmire in her "mountain dress" when her elephant didn't up as expected, or to ford a river in water up to her waist. Not a spring chicken either -- she was nearly 50 when this expedition took place. The ways she travelled and the places she stayed make most of my travel look very, very wimpish indeed.
She also has a real gift for observation and description, hoovering up the details and spitting them out in a very orderly fashion in her letters to her sister. She's full of curiosity, and although she's oddly prejudiced in some ways, she's also generally ready to admire even what may be strange.
She also shares my love of tropical mornings: "The tropic mornings are glorious. There is such an abrupt and vociferous awakening of nature, all dew-bathed and vigorous. The rose-flushed sky looks cool, the air feels cool, one longs to protract the delicious time." So true, so true. "Then with a suddenness akin to that of his setting, the sun wheels above the horizon, and is high in the heavens in no time..." And the long hot day begins...
For all her faults, her manifest love of travel has made her a bit of a heroine to me. Go Isabella -- I hope you're still travelling wherever you are...
She was travelling at the beginning of 1879, and it's amazing how little was known at that time about the area she describes, and how few people lived there. Her account is full of old colonial attitudes, of course, which make you really wince at times (but then it's always sobering to wonder what in our writings will make people really wince in 130 years' time -- assuming they're still around to be read...) And the beginnings of contemporary Malaysia's ethnicity problems are already very clear, as she describes the migrant population increasing by leaps and bounds.
But you have to admire her all the same. She was a game old Bird was Isabella, not dismayed by having to walk four miles through a quagmire in her "mountain dress" when her elephant didn't up as expected, or to ford a river in water up to her waist. Not a spring chicken either -- she was nearly 50 when this expedition took place. The ways she travelled and the places she stayed make most of my travel look very, very wimpish indeed.
She also has a real gift for observation and description, hoovering up the details and spitting them out in a very orderly fashion in her letters to her sister. She's full of curiosity, and although she's oddly prejudiced in some ways, she's also generally ready to admire even what may be strange.
She also shares my love of tropical mornings: "The tropic mornings are glorious. There is such an abrupt and vociferous awakening of nature, all dew-bathed and vigorous. The rose-flushed sky looks cool, the air feels cool, one longs to protract the delicious time." So true, so true. "Then with a suddenness akin to that of his setting, the sun wheels above the horizon, and is high in the heavens in no time..." And the long hot day begins...
For all her faults, her manifest love of travel has made her a bit of a heroine to me. Go Isabella -- I hope you're still travelling wherever you are...