Among the many travel texts about the Dutch East Indies, there are also items that, other than the colourful brochures and richly illustrated manuscripts, are not immediate eye-catchers. This rather tatty notebook, with a dark-blue cover, has a description of the voyage from Rotterdam to Balikpapan (in Borneo, nowadays Kalimantan) that Bets and Dirk Wiemans made on the Tambora in 1920-1921. Dirk was to work in Balikpapan for the Batavian Oil Company (Bataafse Petroleum Maatschappij, BPM). Besides stories about the bright side of life on board ‒ the sumptuous meals, the tourist outings ‒ there are accounts of less pleasant days, when passengers were plagued by sea sickness. Bets Wiemans’s entry for 11 November 1920 reads: ‘Dirk decided to lie down on his bed this afternoon, my stomach started to turn as well, and whoops! everything flew out, but they can’t make me take to my bed.’ Her description of her visit to Port Said shows how unfamiliar ‘the East’ still looked to her: ‘All the women here are veiled in black, they wear a copper tube from their forehead to their nose which only leaves their eyes and mouth free; a peculiar sight, mind you, and strange to us.’
Two pages from Bets Wiemans, Dagboek van een reis naar Batavia, Soerabaja en met eindbestemming Balikpapan, 6 november 1920 tot en met 3 januari 1921. Manuscript. [KITLV D H 1230]