Not for me a beach holiday in Bali. I wanted to go to Spain – and speak Spanish

Christopher Howse explains why he only travels to countries where he speaks the lingo

The first thing I asked for on getting ashore in Spain was a glass of red wine. I had never been to the country before and could speak not a sentence of the language, so I pieced together the request from a dictionary. The woman behind the bar was nonplussed, since each word I’d used and the whole sentence were erroneous. So she served the next customer while I stewed in confusion. Then she explained to me that she’d done this in order to attend to me without hurry. The funny thing was that I didn’t know any of the words she used to me, yet I understood.

I got my glass of wine and have persevered in the 30 years since in my resolution to get to know another country well. The correlative of that enterprise was to rule out visiting lots of countries without bothering about the language. Not for me a beach holiday in Bali, I resolved, nor a tour of German cathedrals with the day rolling past me like a film without subtitles.

I decided to continue visiting different parts of Spain until I could understand its main language and something of its peculiar culture. There is nowhere else so near and so strange. I wouldn’t quite agree that Africa begins at the Pyrenees, but those mountains did produce something of a Lost World to be discovered. I felt an appetite to explore it that the United States did not provoke, even though I could have spoken English there.

The worst way of seeing a foreign country is as a couple in a car. You zoom along a motorway, as available, seeing a lot of embankments and talking to each other. At the hotel, you check in, talking to staff who speak Hotel English, converse with each other over dinner, say little at breakfast and then it’s back into the tin-can-fortwo, motoring to the next destination.