The Dutch bestseller writer Jo van Ammers-Küller lacked the words, in the 1930s, to sing the beauty of the tourist’s Indies. She had successively traversed Java, Bali and Sumatra in six long weeks. Her impressions were published under the title Wat ik zag in Indië (What I Saw in the Indies, 1939). In a Rotterdam Lloyd tourist brochure she describes everything as equally fascinating, interesting and excellent. She was especially taken with the accommodation options in Sumatra. The de-luxe hotel on the Sumatran peninsula of Prapat, located in a bay of Lake Toba, would please even the ‘most coddled traveller’, she remarks: ‘It features a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a marina and a view of the mountains and the water, so divinely beautiful, that I will always be homesick for it in a little corner of my heart.’

How very differently did the journalist and writer Willem Walraven, writing around the same time, rate the colony’s accommodation! In his reports for De Indische Courant he wrote about sad hotels and dreary lodgings. They were remote or lacked atmosphere; and many proprietors similarly were not to Walraven’s liking. Tourists’ experience of the Indies crucially depended on the accommodation where the travellers stayed: proprietors, staff and other guests could all affect the tourist experience, as could the accommodation’s architecture, style, layout and furnishings, and its name.