Travels in the Far East

A woman leaves Milwaukee in 1906 and doesn't stop until she's watched the sun set over the Ganges and wandered through Burmese temples. This is the account of nine months, three continents, and one American woman's furious curiosity about the world. Ellen Mary Hayes Peck sails from New York through the Azores, lands at Gibraltar, threads through the Suez, and finds herself in Egypt, India, Burma, and beyond. She records everything: the chaos of markets, the silence of ancient ruins, the strangers who become traveling companions, the constant thrum of being a stranger yourself. What emerges is less a guidebook than a portrait of encounters - with peoples, landscapes, and her own assumptions. A century later, these pages offer something rare: the freshness of seeing these places as if for the first time, before the camera phone, before the tourist trail, before the world shrank.