I don’t speak any spanish so it was much harder for me in South America, at least in SE Asia everyone’s trying to speak english. Hell, in India without English the Indians wouldn’t be able to speak to one another. Singaporeans first language is English, Bahasa Indonesian is a very, very simple language (anak=child, anak anak=children, which leads to the following curious spelling: anak(2), meaning children ) and will serve you well in both Indonesia and Malaysia. Language really shouldn’t be a problem. On my first visit to Bangkok, you always had your pockets crammed with little snippets of paper with Thai script on them, the address of my hotel, the address of the embassy, post office, back then none of the drivers spoke English but within a few short years it had all changed.
The thing that will serve you best is a great appetite, you will be taken in again and again if you like to eat. It goes like this, in the west when people meet on the street they ask each other “How are you?”, and they don’t really care. In Asia when people meet on the street they ask (no joke) “Have you eaten?” and they really care, and if either answers not they go off to eat.
My first journey to SE Asia 15 yrs ago, it changed my world in a significant way. Maybe it was just the time in my life, who knows, but everything shifted in my perception and was never the same again. Of course, I began a course of travel in exclusively third world countries, I was rapt, drawn like a magnet.
If I could rewind the tape of my life to only one moment, it would be the moment I first stepped off a plane in Asia.
Sometimes when the weather is especially stinking hot & humid in the summer for several days running, and the ashphalt begins to put off a certain aroma,if you close your eyes you could be in Bangkok. Or after a summer rain when it’s so moist you can smell the soil, and the green of the plants even in the dusk, for all the world I can almost smell Bali.
I should soo go back to Asia, it’s been a long time for me.
“Patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.” Bob Dylan