On the 8th of July, 1852, her journey to Sumatra began; and this she has declared to be the most interesting of all her undertakings. From Padang she proceeded to trust herself among the Battas, who are cannibals, and have never suffered any European to come among them. Though the savages opposed her farther advance, she passed forward through the primeval forest, among a population of man-eaters, almost as far as the Lake Eier-Tau. But here she was compelled by threatening spears to retreat, after having been repeatedly assured that she should be killed and eaten. On the 7th of October she got back to Padang. In Sumatra she was twice attacked by the malignant intermittent fever of the country.
Returning to Java, she made excursions to the principalities of Djokdjokarta and Surakarta, to the temple Boro Budoo, and to Surabaga. From thence she sailed to several of the smaller Sunda Islands, and to the Moluccas, Banda, Amboyna, Saparna, Ceram, and Ternate; remained for a few months among the wild Alfores, and closed her rambles among the Sunda Islands by a visit to Celebes.
Again she traversed the Pacific to a distance of 10,150 miles to visit California. For two months she saw nothing but sea and sky. On the 27th of September, 1853, she landed at San Francisco, visited the gold-washing districts on the Sacramento and the Yuba, and slept in the wigwams of the red-skins of Rogue River.
At the end of 1853 Ida Pfeiffer sailed to Panama, and from thence to the Peruvian coast. From Callao she betook herself to Lima, with the intention of crossing the Cordilleras, and proceeding to Loretto, on the Amazon, and thus gaining the eastern coast of South America. The revolution, however, which had just broken out in Peru, made the land unsafe, and compelled our traveler to try and cross the Cordilleras at another point. She returned, accordingly, to Ecuador, and in March, 1854, began her toilsome passage across the mountains. She crossed the chain in the immediate neighborhood of Chimborazo, came to the elevated plateau of Ambato and Tacunga, and witnessed the rare spectacle of an eruption of the volcano Cotopaxi--a sight for which she was afterward envied by Alexander von Humboldt. On reaching Quito on the 4th of April, she did not, unfortunately, find the assistance she had expected in the shape of several trustworthy guides to the Amazon. She therefore gave up her plan of embarking on that river, and had to repeat her wearisome march across the Cordilleras. In the neighborhood of Guayaquil she twice stood in imminent danger of being killed--first by a fall from her mule, and then from an immersion in the River Guaya, which abounds in caymans. Her companions wished her to perish, and did not render the slightest assistance. Deeply disgusted at their inhumanity, she turned her back upon Spanish South America, betook herself by sea to Panama, and at the end of May crossed the Isthmus.