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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Sebastian Hope 2001
Maps © Jillian Luff 2001
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Source ISBN: 9780002571159
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007441099
Version: 2016-07-19
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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
