Destination: Malaysia

Travel Literature

One of the most entertaining travel literature books written about this region is Into the Heart of Borneo (1987) by Redmond O'Hanlon. It's a hilarious account of O'Hanlon's and the poet James Fenton's journey by foot and boat into the Bornean interior in search of the fabled Sumatran rhinoceros. In a more serious vein is Eric Hansen's Stranger in the Forest (2000), in which the intrepid Hansen treks across Sarawak and Kalimantan, facing many perils along the way.

Rehman Rashad's A Malaysian Journey is an affectionate, insightful travelogue by a respected Malaysian journalist of his motorbike trip around the country. It's out of print so search for it in a library.

The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither by Isabella Bird, first published in 1883, finds the doughty Victorian-era traveller wending her way through the Malaysian jungles of Selangor and Perak, and crossing the Bukit Genting pass on the back of an elephant.

Ian Buruma wrote God's Dust in the late 1980s. While the hard-line Islamic commune Buruma visits just outside of Kuala Lumpur (KL) was disbanded by the government in the late 1990s, many of his impressions of the cultural difficulties of the region remain pertinent today. Equally worth a look are VS Naipaul's Among The Believers (1982) and Beyond Belief (1999), both of which have chapters on Malaysia and its experience of Islam.

Among the travel literature on Singapore, the standout is Nigel Barley's entertaining In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles, also titled The Duke of Puddledock. Julian Davison's One For The Road is a nostalgic collection of short stories drawn from the author's recollections of Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s and 1960s, while Neil Humphreys brings the expat view up to date in Notes From An Even Smaller Island (2001) - he's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is but it still has a few pertinent points to make about contemporary Singaporean issues.