Malaysia & Singapore Handbook - Footprint Handbooks

The 'Malay Archipelago' is a term intimately associated with the mystery of the East. It conjures up images of sultans, head-hunters and pirates; munificent jungles brimming with exotic life; clippers cutting through the warm waters of the South China Sea; and of explorers discovering new tribes while planterAsia's multicultural wok. Best of the festivals. Skin-plucking parades, tattoos for the brave. A tale of blue mansions. Full colour maps. Saris, silk, spices and Shiva. Skulls in the longhouse, tea at the plantation. How to get off the beaten track. Dream beaches for turtles. Chopstick clatter, Bollywood beats and the music of the muezzin...s sit on verandahs taking tiffin and, later, a pink gin laced with quinine to keep malaria at bay. Today's Malay Archipelago is somewhere very different. As with Singapore, whose godowns have been replaced by towering glass and steel office blocks and whose rickshaw pullers have become English-speaking workers with incomes among the highest in the world, Malaysia too is thrusting and self-confident with a mission to transform itself into a developed country by 2020 - and notwithstanding its brush with the Asian economic crisis.

Malaysia divides into two different worlds, not only geographically but culturally too. Sandwiched between Singapore to the south and Thailand to the north, West - or Peninsular - Malaysia is the industrial, political and economic heartland of the country. While Malaysia Borneo is a territory of forests and rivers, mountains and caves, tribes and abundant wildlife which dovetails more closely with the romantic vision of 'Malaya' the Peninsula states support the great bulk of the country's population.

Covers:
Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and peninsular Malaysia and Sarawak, Saba in Malaysian Borneo.

Special Features:
16 pages highlights of the region illustrated with colour photography