Footprint Malaysia Handbook with Singapore

From the Footprint Handbooks series.

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 and planters sit on verandahs taking tiffin and pink gin laced with quinine to keep malaria at bay.

Lord of the Rim
Today's Malay Archipelago is somewhere very different. Singapore's godowns (warehouses) have been replaced by towering glass and steel office blocks. The rickshaw pullers, who rarely lived long enough to see middle age, have become English-speaking workers with incomes among the highest in the world and a health system that sustains them well into old age. Malaysia, thrusting and self-confident, is following where Singapore has been, with a mission to transform itself into a developed country by 2020 - and notwithstanding its brush with the Asian economic crisis.

Split personality
Malaysia divides into two different worlds. West - or Peninsular - Malaysia is the industrial, political and economic heartland of the country, while East Malaysia is a territory of forests and rivers, mountains and caves, tribes and abundant wildlife. Sandwiched between Singapore to the south and Thailand to the north, the Peninsula states support the great bulk of the country's population. And, just as Malaysia itself is a country of two halves, so the Peninsula too can be broadly divided into a vibrant western side and a bucolic east separated by the Barisan Titiwangsa, the Peninsula's jungled spine.

Singapore swing
Singapore is a world-class city with world-class attractions and only the barest whiff of the East. When the Orient does appear it has invariably been sequestered by New Singapore. Hundred year-old shophouses have been converted into drinking holes and edgy studios while the bumboats which used to ferry cargo from freighter to godown now carry tourists up and down the restaurant-lined Singapore River. Renowned for its epicurean delights, Singapore is aiming to become a regional centre for the arts too.

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

Regularly: $21.95  Now: $17.56  Save $4.39 (20%)

HB9520    Footprint Malaysia Handbook with Singapore            $17.56

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