I've spent some considerable time in Bali and Indonesia, and I spoke the language at around B1 at the time.

Unfortunately, Indonesia and Bali are kleptocracies where a lot of people are on the take. I leaned the Indonesian phrase, "Can I pay an immediate fine?" (HINT HINT) in case I ever had trouble with the police.

Foreigners are not allowed to own property in Bali, but in fact, the tourist areas are controlled behind the scenes by cartels of foreigners.

It's deliberately made very hard for foreigners to stay in Bali (which I agree with, as it's a tiny island).

You can stay for six months, and then you have to leave the country for two weeks, but more, if they decided you are actually trying to live there, they can just deport you with little or no due process.

Now, if you just stay under the radar they won't bug you. Gray and her partner fell afoul of this, probably unawares, and once authorities heard about it, their days were numbered.

Oh, and the cartels that "own" the tourist places are mainly Australian, and while a lot of Australians are super-liberal and progressive, there are a lot of right-wing racists there too, so that didn't help, I'm sure.

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I have a lot of sympathy for Gray. In this case, "doing your homework" would have involved learning Indonesian. As languages completely unrelated to English go, it's very easy - which means we're talking hundreds or thousands of hours of study even if you already knew another language.

For many people, it would simply be impossible. It took my wife, who's very bright, years to learn Dutch as her first second language, even though we're living in the Netherlands, and Dutch is very close to English - because language learning is very hard.

I would strongly suggest considering Africa as a place to get away from we white devils (note - I'm a white guy, but I'm dead fucking serious here - white Anglo-Saxons like me are literally destroying the planet.)

Ghana is stable and quite affluent and has been a destination for Americans of color fleeing oppression for decades.

Recently, a friend of mine moved to Botswana for similar reasons, and speaks highly of it, though I haven't done any research.