High points of travel writing
Just when you thought the travel-writing wave was over and the rapid commercialisation of Asian tourism had all but kicked over the traces of a more sedate colonial era, up comes Barbara Crossette with her delightful and thoughtful The Great Hill Stations Of Asia.
The book breathes new life into the travel-writing genre, and indeed into jaded travellers looking to sneak off the beaten path in search of the last few peaceful places left before they, too, succumb to slow death by pollution and overcrowding.
On litters, in sedan-chairs, on ponies, by foot if they were able, Europeans in Asia nearly two centuries ago began to colonise the hills in search of a more hospitable climate - for relaxation, health and sometimes their sanity.
Colonialism came and went. But the hill stations remain as places to relax and escape from the steamy heat of the plains. They are still there, shadows of their former glorious past, but still functioning as retreats worth visiting.
In India, Simla and Darjeeling are almost legendary, but there are others such as Ooty and the Kodaikanal in the south. Sri Lanka had its tea plantations in the hills. Burma had Maymyo and Taungyi. And of course Malaysia had its Maxwell Hill and Cameron Highlands.
Not to be outdone, even the French built hill stations in Vietnam, and the Americans did the same in the Philippines. But the hill station was a peculiarly British thing.
It was not just the desire to create a 'little bit of home' in the verdant hills, with lovingly tended gardens and chimneys that gave hill stations their charm and made them so different from other towns founded by colonisers. Often major engineering feats were required to build narrow-gauge railways or funiculars where once only sedan chairs would go, so desperate was the desire to get away from the heat and humidity of the Asian lowlands.
The Peak, in its sedan-chair era before it became today's garish monstrosity, is the closest Hong Kong gets to a hill station. It is a poor comparison as it is more accessible, but it has its particular history - an other-worldliness exaggerated when the fog descends, and the type of class system and hierarchy that set hill stations apart as social enclaves from their neighbouring lowland areas.
Each hill station has a past that is different from those of the colonial commercial and administrative centres. As places of rest and recreation, and as summer capitals, they had a mixture of countryside beauty and pretensions to grandeur. Some hill towns have survived and prospered, redeveloped and overdeveloped (as in Malaysia), while some have all but died with the advent of mass tourism, unable to cope with the sheer numbers (Ooty, for instance).
Still, many retain their charm and a hint of their past glories, not least in the personal stories of people, some still alive, who year after year went up to the hills and can remember the stations in their heyday.
This is a wonderful book by a New York Times correspondent who spent many years in Asia. It delves into local history to tell it as it was then through the people who were there, and through the author's own travels, shows them as they are now, warts and all. It is neither a sentimental journey nor a glorification of the past, but a book that has you itching to see for yourself.
THE GREAT HILL STATIONS OF ASIA, Barbara Crossette Westview Press, $280
