Los Angeles Herald, Number 354, 19 September 1899 — American Woman Cyclist in Java [ARTICLE]

American Woman Cyclist in Java

Mrs. Fanny Bullock Workman, daughter of ex-Governor Bullock of Massachusetts, who is now in Kashmir preparing for a climbing trip in Baltlstan, has just finished a cycling tour of 1200 miles in Java. She is the first woman to wheel the length of the island. The chief obstacles a cyclist meets with are the (in most parts) enervating heat, Java being only five degrees from the line, the many steep gradients, and often very poor roads, the food, which the Dutch call good, but which must be, Mrs. Workman says, thoroughly disagreeable to an Anglo-Saxon palate, and the difficulty of making one's self understood. Owing to the Dutch system of keeping the people down, the Javanese, as a whole, i while quiet and well-mannered, are decid-

edly stupid in the interior. Only in the large towns is Malay spoken, so that a smattering of that language is of little use in mid-Java, where Javanese predominates, or in the mountains, where such dialects as Sundanese and Tengerese are used. The tropical nature, combined with grand mountain peaks rising to over 12,000 feet from the plains, is overwhelmingly beautiful. "In my Asiatic wanderings," writes Mrs. Workman, "I have wheeled, through much enchanting scenery, in the palm and banyan groves of Orissa, over the green and scarlet slopes of the Terai, which*culminate in the grand hills at Darjeelling, and in that loveliest of palm islands, Ceylon; but 1 nave never before cycled 1200 miles through a. country so continuously beautiful and where tyvery scene that unfolds itself to the cycler is either graceful, grand or weirdly lovely. "The Hindu and Buddhist temples are also of great interest, and compare favorably with those of India, from which land the original architects came." — Woman's Journal.