Thirty-three Things to Remember When Wandering Southeast Asia (the World)

Herewith a few things I've learned over the years about wandering in Southeast Asia, India, a small piece of China, and all of Latin America. Useful tips and such, I think, to anyone with a hankering to do more or less as I do--take all those roads by bus or train or plane or truck or taxi or bike and sometimes on foot that go, well, nowhere. And yet go everywhere that arrests and boggles the senses and enriches the mind and the memory bank as few things in life do.

1. All generalizations about places are suspect and usually wrong and rarely as interesting as small scale specifics. All good geographies are small scale, and usually begin and end in individual stories. The road is all about stories.
2. If possible, don't do the same thing twice. Move around among hotels, try different kinds of foods, try bars and such that range from the seedy to those that are obnoxiously upscale. Diversity is everything, on the road as in life.
3. Constantly ask questions, of anyone within ten or fifteen feet, or 51 meters. A quick intro or something about where you are from and you're off and running--to information on what's worth doing, or avoiding, or how best to get from this place to another place not so far away. And what's the latest gossip about...?
4. Carry at least two ATM cards (debit only) and a duplicate or two and keep in different places; and carry at all times a couple of hundred dollars or euros (good anywhere) and keep in different places (shoes, money belt, front pocket, daypack); and also a couple of hundred in traveler's checks. Spread the risk around. Money is the second most valuable asset you have on the road. Your health is first.
5. Avoid most tourist sites. They're just that--commercial and touristy, packed with lumpy and empty-minded tourists, often mundane, often as easily or better appreciated on the Discovery Channel or in a good photo book. They are rarely what a country is about, and are almost always a distortion of what a country is really all about.
6. Eat street food--it's often great and different than you’ve known. But avoid water outside cities. Water probably more than food is your enemy.
7. Avoid long train and bus rides. The scenery is rarely worth it and the time lost and the discomforts are not good tradeoffs for the money saved. Take planes. They get you to interesting spots fast, they're safer than buses, and the difference in price isn't worth it.
8. Don't trust anyone, or anyone anymore than you have to, especially locals. Anyone interested in you and eager to do something for you is after your money and probably working a scam. Or worse.
9. Get all prices you’re going to pay out front, before the service is performed. Never go for the line: The amount is up to you. Wait until after the service is performed to find out how much you’re going to pay and you’ll invariably be sorry.
10. Don't have a fixed itinerary and be infinitely adaptable. Many of the best things happen when you meet someone and they say, Have you seen or been to?...and you're off. For a couple of days or a week to a place or experience you might never have heard about before.
11. Take alone Lonely Planet books or their equivalent for the countries you're going to visit, but use them mainly for the local maps and info on transportation. Ask taxi or other local transport drivers for info on places to stay--it's often as good or better than the Lonely Planet info, and more up to date.
12. Never let your small daypack, with camera and some money and a few critical medicines and just about everything you cannot afford to lose or have stolen, out of sight. Not to take a pee, not even to find the waitress to get your bill. And when sitting, sit with a foot through one of the straps. Trust the bag to no one.
13. Don't use the big and cumbersome backpacks that backpackers use. You’ll have to check them on planes, all your clothes smell and look like they're been through wrinkle machines, everything you need is invariably at the bottom of the backpack, and it's easier most of the time just pulling one of those small rectangular bags that are allowed in carry-on and make it easy to get to everything. And you've always got clothes that look and smell like they just came from the laundry.
14. Forget about haggling for small amounts in taxi or a hotel room or anything else. Often it's an insult to locals and portrays foreigners in a bad light; and the amount of money you're talking about over the course of wandering the road for a couple of months won't come to more than a hundred or two hundred dollars. Who in his right mind wants to spend rich travel time worrying about four bits here and a buck there?
15. When in doubt, pay a couple bucks more for a hotel room at night. It's not the hot water that matters, but the lower risk of anything you've got being ripped off. And the lower likelihood of having to deal with bedbugs and mosquitoes. Of course, in many really out of the way places, the best you'll get is a three or four-dollar room in which the cockroach races on the walls and across the heels of your feet will be a regular event. And something to be uniquely enjoyed, like just about everything else on the road.
16. Avoid group tours and treks if possible, and if you find a good trek try to take it alone with a guide even if it costs two or three times as much. You can go at your own pace, ask a thousand questions, and not have to deal with others whose interests are elsewhere or nowhere at all.
17. Your four most valuable medicines on the road are sun block, Cortisone, Deet, and bottled water. The sun can be a worse enemy than bad water and food that will make you retch all day long.
18. Nothing that you imagined a place will be when at home or in a classroom will be anything like the real thing, and herein lies so much of the marvelous surprise of travel. The reason for travel to places unknown, and more often than not for not staying too long in one place, unless you fashion yourself an up-and-coming academic anthropologist or sociologist or some such animal. Who wants to be one of these incomprehensible beasts who only speak in incomprehensible jargon and only to people like themselves?
19. Nothing is quite as revealing as the comparative perspective, which is the reason for keeping on the go--to new places, different countries, and up to a point returning to those same countries and even some of those same places. Just the right number of times with just the right time interval between repeat visits.
20. Just when you think you know something about a place or a country and are eager to share your generality with everyone you’ve ever known, chances are pretty good that it won't be long before you'll find that you were either utterly mistaken or mistaken enough to be more than a little embarrassed by your ignorance.
21. Never carry anyone else's bag, foreigner, friend or otherwise; you don't want to be responsible for someone else's secrets and nasty addictions, which could be more than a little trouble when passing through an airport or a checkpoint and someone in authority demands to see specifically what you are carrying in bags in your hands. I'm talking about those goodies seen so often on the road in Asia, namely, hard drugs that can get you in unreal kinds of trouble.
22. Seek out long-term ex-patriots, especially in countries where you don't speak the language. They're a rich source of information about what to do and what you can get away with and how to get out of trouble or pay your way out of trouble, and they often have a treasure trove of stories about the local area. A great many of them are alcoholics, drug addicts, and social misfits who spent too many years of their lives welding pipes and driving trucks and getting out of bad marriages. But this is not your concern, or your concern only in so far as they make for good stories.
23. There's no such thing as a loan when you're on the road. Everything you give to someone else, local or traveler, you'll never see again.
24. If you feel or smell or sense trouble, then there probably is trouble, and not far away. Cut your losses and either walk away or run if necessary, and forget your investment of time and money. In a foreign country you never have enough information to know how to get out of the trouble you're getting into or where to find the exits when the bad shit really begins to come your way.
25. As much as possible, travel alone. You’ll meet more people, you’ll have more options to meet people and do interesting and off-beat things, and you won’t find yourself having to adhere to someone else’s demands and schedules and petty concerns—about eating, about sleeping, about travel modes, about money, about almost anything.
26. Travel light, or as light as possible. As light as possible means don’t forget a good notebook and a good digital camera with a way to save the hundreds if not thousands of photos you’ll want to take because when on the road you have no idea which one’s you’ll want and which are the good ones until you’re home and have plenty of time to choose from among the many.
27. No question asked of anyone, and no matter how many times, is stupid. The most amazing things heard or discovered often happen when you ask the most innocent of questions, or perhaps have asked that same question four or five times in the course of two or three days. A decent memory and often-repeated questions are behind most worthwhile and lasting road discoveries.
28. As much as possible, avoid backpackers. They’re young, they’re naïve, they love themselves and their tattoos and good luck bracelets, they spend an inordinate amount of time grousing about petty amounts of money, and the generalities they have about locals and local conditions are much more often than not just plain wrong. Their ignorance is bested only by their cultural insensitivity and eagerness to haggle endlessly to save five cents. They are the worst cultural ambassadors imaginable.
29. Always carry plenty of bottled water. It’s an easy way to avoid dehydration and a sense of exhaustion, and it’ll substitute for hours when the available food is suspect and best avoided.
30. Avoid fights of any kind with locals. You don’t know where they will go, and almost always you’ll lose if the fight gets out of hand. In a fight, it’s all locals against the foreigner; the issue and fairness are irrelevant.
31. Losses and mistakes are inevitable: a lost hat here, a forgotten shampoo bottle there, money that goes missing, a place or a meal for which you paid too much. Accept the losses and forget them right away. Thinking about them only takes away from the pleasure that’s a mere five minutes away.
32. Don’t ask to take photos. Just take them and move on. Almost all photos taken with permission aren’t worth a dime. Who wants a candied face in the lenses?
33. Drink lots of beer and don’t mix it with wine or hard alcohol. You’ll piss well, you’ll play well, you’ll dream well, and you’ll sleep well.

The author can be contacted at:  korski1@cox.net

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