It is a new coffee table book celebrating the Grand Tour of Southeast Asia in the 1920s, and based on the first, Southeast Asian, leg of my Grand Tour of the East, which I posted here on Dream Of A City from June 2012 to August 2013. Retracing the journey of those grand tourists of the ‘20s, the book takes today’s traveller through 12 fabled port cities in what was then known as the East Indies.

Setting sail from Rangoon (Yangon), we visit Penang, Malacca, Singapore, Batavia (Jakarta), Surabaya, Bangkok, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Phnom Penh, Hanoi and Manila before disembarking at Hong Kong harbour.

Each chapter presents a historical and photographic overview of the city’s old town, colonial precincts and living cultural heritage, drawing on archival images, maps and accounts, as well as contemporary photos.

In each city, we also stop at the city’s grand colonial hotel – the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, the Eastern & Oriental Hotel in Penang and the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi, to name a few.

As part of the on-going marketing and publicity campaign for the book, I am starting a new blog – http://www.romanceofthegrandtour.com – where in the course of the year, I shall be posting images, photographs, maps and quotes from my book; interesting stories related to the “making of” the book; book events in the region, AND – as a plus – images, quotes, bits of history that are related to the history of travel, or to the 12 port cities in my book, but which did not make it into the “final cut.”

You are all invited to come on board ship at http://www.romanceofthegrandtour.com, for a journey of history, nostalgic and excitement!