Vintage travel brochure for the fledgling tourist destinations of Java, Bali, and Sumatra, issued by the Travellers Official Information Bureau of the Netherlands Indies in 1936. A world map advertises the Netherlands Indies as, "the very centre of round-the-world travel." Photographs flank the map, including one of Villa Isola, an art deco villa hotel in Bandung used by the Japanese Army during the war and is today the headmastership office of Indonesia University of Education.
Of the Netherlands Indies, Bali in particular started to entice tourists in the 1930s with the releases of works such as Gregor Krause's 1922 photographic book Bali: People and Art, Hickman Powell's 1930 The Last Paradise, Miguel Covarrubias' 1937 Island Of Bali, and the 1932 movie Virgins of Bali. The artist Walter Spies moved there in 1927, and in the decade that followed, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Charlie Chaplin, Barbara Hutton, and Noel Coward visited.
The verso has separate maps of Java, Bali, and Sumatra, showing air routes, railways, motor roads, rivers, and regular steamship lines.
The brochure notes that the KLM flight between Amsterdam and Batavia runs twice a week and takes about six days, with stopovers through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia.