Not everyone shared van Maurik’s and others’ enthusiasm about the accommodation options in the Dutch East Indies. Bas Veth, once called the biggest ‘grouser’ ever to have lived in the Indies, was extremely critical of hotel life in the colony. In 1879 he travelled from Amsterdam to Batavia, where he put down roots and built a life for himself. In his book Het leven in Nederlandsch-Indië (Life in the Dutch East Indies, 1900) Veth rants against Indies ‘hotel misery’. It might be a ‘disgusting subject’, but the hotels did give a clear insight into what life was truly like in the East Indies. Anyone accustomed to European ways would find it impossible, he states, to imagine the ‘mess’ that he encountered in the Indies. The hotel rooms barely deserved the name; the walls were gross and thin, and the floors were damp, greasy and full of cracks, as in the ‘cellars and coal sheds of Dutch houses’. The furniture was cheap, mosquito nets were riddled with holes and rugs were worn and stained. The rooms teemed with cockroaches, lizards, spiders, rats, mice and insects, and are filled with a persistent sewer stench. An Indies hotel room is best compared to a prison cell, according to Veth: the guest feels lonely, fearful and miserable, and not seldom commits suicide. Needless to say: Veth was an anti-tourist.
Bas Veth, Het leven in Nederlandsch-Indië. Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1900. [KIT Collection ; P 84-467]
Portrait of Bas Veth (The Hague, Museum of Literature)