I'm alway a visitor. But the locals think I'm a travelling clown.

Sure, I can handle simple Thai, Lao, Indonesian, Chinese and Malay but I'm mute when it comes to Burmese, Hindi, Vietnamese and Khmer.

Lugging around a English to Whatever language handbook helps a little. It often sends the locals into uncontrollable fits of laughter rolling over the dirt when they they hear me say "I want to kiss the backside of your mother's chicken" when I'd meant to say "Hi! Good Morning!!!"

Othertimes, they want to pull out the ol' gun or rice sickle and take me out there on the spot when I mis-translated a simple compliment into something along the lines of "Your Momma...." This almost always happen when I approach a local with an adorable child on his lap and ask who the child's mother is.

I now find shutting up better and use mostly hand-signs. Despite this, a risk of offending the locals still exist. I and every single one of the other 6 billion humans on Earth are familiar with the International Standard Meaning of sticking up the Middle Finger.

However, little pockets of humanity will have their own unique favourite set of Local obscene hand gestures.

This seems an important anthropological discovery as the phenomenon is observed from the 'hoods of Los Angelese, to the streets of Liverpool and Moscow all the way around the other side of the world to obsure villages in parts of western Thailand, northern Laos and central Cambodia.

I innocently picked my nose with my little finger once in front of a Malaysian fisherman cleaning squid with his bare hands. The more I dug in to get the snot out, the harder he cleaned his squid. Our combined gestures, according to my guide, meant that I'd consented to spend the night with him.....cleaning 'squid'

The End

Postscript: Travelling is fun, especially when you end up in a land where few speak your language. Both the locals and yourselves are open books to one another. Learning simple pharases before hand helps, like......

"Hi!"

"How Much"

"Where's the Toilet?" (Forget about where everything else is, they'll not be used as much as this)

"Turn Left"

"Turn Right"

"Stop"

"Yes"

"No"

and the most important....."Beer"