Travellers' ChecksMata Hari’s Medan: Indonesian city where the ill-fated exotic dancer and second-rate spy once lived

Cathay Dragon will begin serving Medan, the capital of Indonesia’s North Sumatra province, and Davao City, in the Philippines, later this year, with flights that, we are told, “will link Hong Kong with these rapidly growing Asean cities for the first time”.

Back in 2011, AirAsia operated four non-stop weekly flights between Hong Kong and Medan from January to September of that year, using Medan’s Polonia International Airport. An Indonesian Air Force base since 2013, this was the last stop for KLM aircraft flying what was the world’s longest scheduled air service throughout the 1930s.

Weary passengers arriving in Medan with the Dutch carrier changed to the domestic airline KNILM (or Royal Dutch Indies Airways) for the last leg to Batavia (now Jakarta) or Singapore. Since leaving Amsterdam, they would have flown almost a third of the way around the globe, with overnight stops in Rome, Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Jodhpur, Calcutta and Bangkok.

One of Medan’s more famous residents, Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, arrived in May 1899 – from neighbouring Java – taking up residence at the then newly opened Hotel de Boer for several days, before moving into a private home with her Dutch army-officer husband and two children. She left two years later, soon to become a guest, and resident spy, at many of Europe’s grandest hotels, having reinvented herself as exotic femme fatale Mata Hari.