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Twelve years ago, on a three month walking and cycling trip through Sri Lanka and India, a friend and I decided to aim for the full triathlon and add in a bit of water transport. We were in Kerela, on the backwaters around Alleppy.

The town was surrounded by canals, lagoons and palm fringed sandy islets; the locals had elegant dug out canoes. Carla and I wanted to hire one of the latter to gondola around the former for three or four days, camping out at night. With a mouthful of very, very basic Malayalam (the lingo written in the form of cartoon elephants and mice, to my eye at least, and, indeed, sounding somewhat Disneyesque to my ear as well) I approached a dugout owner parked-up in a small ditch and used some ten words to draw up a contract. He would get a wad of rupees, we would get a hunk of axed-out wood and a paddle for 72 hours. We sealed the pact with an international pidgin of sign language; head waggling, hand shaking and face bisecting smiles.

We turned up the next morning with a trishaw filled with pots, pans, boxes of food, jerry cans of water and mosquito nets. Pushpen (the closest I got to his name, and though appropriate for his mindset as it would turn out, indicative of my sloppy attitude to foreign words) looked on in curiosity as I cargoed up the tiny canoe. As we boarded ourselves, he jumped in and firmly took the paddle from me, giving vent to a long monologue. From the four words in a hundred that I actually understood, I confidently mistranslated to Carla that, “he's coming with us for the first bit to show us how to paddle and then we're going to drop him off at his family's island and continue alone.”

He paddled us down the canal and off into the maze of islands. By early afternoon he was still with us, though we had indeed stopped at a small village, where he had invited a bunch of grateful friends of his to eat three days' worth of rations. My Malayalam was far from adequate when it came to finding out when we were actually going to lose him and assume captaincy of our ship. Finally we pulled over to a large sailing canoe where a deckhand in delightfully archaic English translated between us.

When he told Pushpen that I was under the impression that we had hired the canoe for three days of backwater wandering but without him, our trusty paddler looked exactly as if the Indian passengers of a London black cab had suggested dropping the cabby himself off at a transport cafe, and going off for three days of self-drive with the meter running. I learnt, pretty pronto, the Malayalam for "Not on your - asterisk times seven - Nelly."

Pushpen thought he'd been hired to punt us around the backwaters for three days, with nightly returns to Alleppy. No wonder he'd been mystified by the amount of stuff we'd appeared to think it necessary for a day's picnic. We paddled back to town, (he let me paddle, as a consolation prize), our trip in tatters. En route to a hotel, we handed out sparkling new cooking pots and jerrycans to bemused beggars.

Languages and mathematics are the three things I’m really bad at, but I realised that for successful off-beat travel I was going to have to approach filthy foreign lingos with a more positive attitude.

For the walkers and travellers of this world there are many good reasons for learning local languages. Avoiding Pushpen type situations is one of them. And, because, as a hustler explained to me in Marrakech, “a foreigner who speaks nothing of Arabic, or Berber or even French is like a child to me when I guide him - I am their mouth and ears, so they will do whatever I want, and understand nothing.” He rubbed his hands in glee. It's well to remember that somebody who has bothered to learn your language has done it for a reason - whether to sell carpets, hire out camels, or ask for cadeaux. To regain control you need to be able to speak enough of the local patois to be able to both recognise phrases like “let's overcharge him by ten times the going rate,” and to reply confidently, “No! No! I'm only paying half that.” Guys who speak your language have usually spent more time with tourists than learning the by-ways of the mountains, and that's not necessarily good in a local hill-guide.

The final, and perhaps the most important reason to make, at the very least, an attempt at a language, is to entertain bored guides, muleteers and border police. My approach to learning languages changed totally when I was pointing out to a French girl how her “eez it possible to 'av a ... some...'ow do you zay...eau...wa-ter” attempts at English melted my heart. “But eet eez ze same for me when you speak French,” she replied, “because it sound so sex-u-al.” Okay, not the impression I want to give to every faux guide and bus driver between Paris and Indo-Chine, but better than sounding like the idiot that I’d assumed that halting progress in somebody else's tongue marked one as.

And there's good news for the aspirant linguist. The most widely spoken language globally is English, (so if you're reading this, even if you're moving your lips, you're already ahead of those who are born with Grawadungalung as their mother tongue). Next comes Chinese, useful if trekking in China or trying to get a perfect piece of wind-dried duck in Soho.

Then comes Hindi, a handy lingua franca for most of the subcontinent. We're back on safe ground with Spanish, a language so logical (though shouting a lot, like the native speakers, helps comprehension) that even I speak it well. Russian, the next most spoken tongue, is a bit specific, though useful if you're off to shin up Mount Elbrus. French is the sixth most universal language - giving you the opportunity to plume d' ma tante in a surprisingly disparate number of locations. Then Arabic - a sod to learn, (success lies in the silky, hawking from the back of the throat ain sound) but worth the effort for it's status world-wide as a trading idiom, and for ensuring you're the last hostage shot in a trade-off hijack situation.

After that there are another 4,493 'living languages' to wrestle with, but of course you only need to join the thousand or so Nahali chatterers, if you're actually contemplating an extended walk across Madhya Pradesh (I cycled it, so requiring much less linguistic commitment).

There's more good news - a basic ability in any language, covering (with, admittedly, some ingenuity) just about every situation, runs to some 850 words, which is about the RAM needed to learn approximately 15 of The Beatles’ obscurer songs. (The 'hey-Jude-I-am-the-walrus' school of English was greatly favoured in the old East Bloc). If you want further encouragement you'll be heartened to know that a chimpanzee, Washoe, learnt to hold intelligent conversations with a vocabulary of 132 American Sign Language words, thereby putting him ahead, in the communications game, of some 70% of people who head off to foreign shores with nothing but their mother tongue to see them through.

Better still, to merely get you, your pack and the contents of your wallet safely through a ten day hike across the Himalayas takes no more than a foundation vocabulary of forty or so judiciously chosen words which can be added to as situations arise. A smidgen of chimp sign language can fill in the gaps.

The method I use is to write down a crib sheet of essential building blocks in a rough phonetic form - the nouns for mountain, river, market, boots or whatever; qualities like big, small, far, good and bloody awful; and do-it-all verbs such as go, give, want, eat, sleep and how much - and to practise them on the outward flight (oh, how the hostesses avoid me when they hear me muttering chhota and pahar to myself as the plane lifts Bombay-wards). The ever more tattered list lives in my top pocket until redundant. Once on the ground I buy a local dictionary to top-up with; old colonial ones being by far the most amusing.

My Persian phrase book gives me the Farsi for “send 50 spades and three axes as quickly as possible”, and my Hindi lexicon, circumstances allowing, supplies the words for “his breast-plate is dirty...he will hang tomorrow.”

Further encouragement to try out weird and wonderful dialogue comes from knowing that many people's worldwide are already dealing with life in a second language, just as you are. The many forms of Berber Tashelhite and Tamazrt are local to particular valleys, mountains and far-flung wastelands - for inter-regional trading they use a bastardised pidgin Berber and basic Magrebi Arabic, using the aorist tense, a loose and simplified verb system which means pretty much 'listen up and watch my hands to find out whether I mean past, present or future.' That's my kind of language. And works in the sort of situation that arises when a group of ten or so nationalities pitch up at the same remote mountain refuge, and press seven common lingos into a mixture of conversation and Chinese whispers, ensuring that everybody gets to swig somebody else's national poison and learn nine new ways of saying 'cheers.'

Walking itself is a great language classroom - full of the two most important things; time to practise and people to practise on. I turned an eight month promenade around Morocco into a chance to learn passable Tashelhite and Magrebi, though my forays into the former started in confusion when the sketches of local items I showed to people to discover the words for them threw up a surprisingly varied range of things - camel, tent, kettle - called, apparently, izewwiqn. It took three days to realise that I was being given the Tashelhite word for a 'drawing.'

Speaking a language badly can be an advantage. For historic reasons tromping around Poland speaking perfect Deutch, even though it's a second language for many Poles, goes down badly. And Danish in Iceland doesn't do much for your popularity either. Nor French in West Africa, or Spanish amongst indigenous populations in Mexico. But speaking any of those languages rather poorly in those places marks you out as somebody merely using a communications tool and not the carrier of linguistic baggage. In fact it might even pay to speak broken English, perhaps with a Norwegian accent, when striding around ex-British colonies.

Remember too, that there are non verbal languages that work world-wide. A photographer acquaintance, Tom, carries balloons with him - "small, light and cheap" - and can inflate and twist them into poodles, dragons and clowns' faces faster than you can say es-hal daraem in an Iranian pharmacy. I carry a harmonica or guitar. Christina, another friend, always totes a sketchbook and pens. When one is travelling all one is trying to do is communicate, to break through the 'otherness' and find the 'like us' of different peoples. Words aren't bad for that - however mangled, mispronounced, or hesitant.


Language Books.
Both Lonely Planet and Rough Guides produce breast-pocket sized phrase books to languages which are often obscure to everybody except those trekking in remote corners of the world. Though low on postillion-struck-by-lightning tosh, they require a certain amount of work to make them useful.

Learn and understand the pronunciation system, and read through the vocabulary to get an ear for the language, hi-lite useful phrases, and pick out a core vocabulary to write out on a separate sheet and learn by heart.

'Spanish in three weeks' type cassette and book courses are pointless if picked up two days before your flight leaves (and often pretty useless even if given the full three weeks).

Decide on a reasonable level of language competence appropriate to your trip. A short vocabulary based around politeness and survival will suffice for a three day stroll in Portugal, but two months trekking in Ethiopia is worth more effort. In the latter situation consider finding a native speaker, near where you live, for one-to-one tuition (bonuses being that you learn fast, get a feel for the nuances of the culture, might well make contacts in your destination country and, invariably in the case of obscure languages, end up putting a few quid in the pocket of a struggling and probably illegal immigrant to Britain). Universities and cultural associations are good foraging grounds for native speakers.

For longer trips also consider doing an intensive language course in your destination country before heading off into the hills. Caledonia Languages Abroad (0131 - 621 7721) are good for South and Central America with a particularly good Spanish programme in Cuba with dance tuition thrown in. Local lessons are easy to find and cheap in places such as Nepal, Morocco and throughout the former East Bloc.

Above all, speak. A few words learnt on the outbound flight from a phrase book, and cribbed from your word list over the first days will grow from a trickle, into a stream, into a river of language. Recall that every time you mispronounce egeszsegedre as you raise a glass of palinka to your lips in Hungary, or stumble over had lbeet mezyana as you hotel hunt in Tunisia, the smiles are not at your errors but encouragement of your being brave enough to try to break the language barrier.

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