OH to be a man! This kind of travel is while not impossible, much more problematic for women. I think I have penis envy.

East and South Asia are easier than many places for single women travelers. I know quite a few who have done so and not really had any problems. Much safer than in the USA. This seems most certain in the Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist Confucian cultural zones.
Traveling alone is great because the locals will approach you more readily than when you are with other foreigners. The Lonely Planet books tell you how to do it and give all the warnings to single women traveling. Do it. You will experience some of the most amazing acts of kindness from complete strangers.
And remember, we live in the most dangerous country on earth except for the war zones.

The only extensive travel I've done in my adult life was in Ecuador, and I had halfway decent Spanish. I'll be heading overseas again sometime in the next five years, but I have no idea what it's like to travel with no grasp of the local language. I can still do South America and India, and maybe the southeast quarter of Africa, with just English and Spanish. But I'd like to do Thailand, Malaysia, Iran, and/or Turkey. Obviously every country is different, and I imagine Thailand would be much easier than say Cambodia for an English-only traveller. But you've just been in Singapore, Thailand, and Laos, IIRC. How are those countries going, and how different are they in difficulty? How are you managing to function in a place like Laos, when you're obviously not on the high-dollar tourist circuit? (I too prefer chicken buses!)

Anyway, kudos for doing it! I'm reading your updates with interest.

It might be faster if you access gmail via IMAP or POP and say to hell with the web access. It works for me--and google doesn't charge a premium rate for POP access like, say, Yahoo does.

IMAP can be configured to retrieve headers only, and leave the email on the server.

Quick to view the mailbox, and then download only those you want to read.

So, if I'm not around, rest assured I'm on a chicken bus somewhere, with a local sleeping on one shoulder and goats, chickens and bags of rice clogging up the aisles. Somethings are just too priceless.

I once rode a bus like that into the Drakensberg of Kwazulu in South Africa.

An old man dropped his sack of chicken feed, spilling perhaps a fifth of the sack.

He spent the rest of the trip, up and over mountain passes, over bumpy roads, around and about hair pin bends going on hands and knees collecting from under the crowded seats, every last lost grain.

That trip did a lot to recalibrate my notion of "value".

I especially remember despite their poverty (or perhaps because?), how much they laughed and joked when the old mans chicken crapped on the bloke who was holding it!

When last were you on a city commuter bus when the whole bus erupted into an uproar of jokes and friendly laughter?

In most of SEA violence against women is far lower than it is in the west. And for that matter random violence in general seems to be less prevalent, as an observation, after four years living in SEA and traveling extensively.

penguins s.p. are you running linux? if so you might try lynx, the asci text web browser no html. no javascripts which might cause problems with some websites but gmail works well once you get used to tabbing thru the page all the time!

m.google.com

Because mobile phones do not have the same bandwidth capabilities as their desktop/laptops counterparts, Google offers a mobile version of MOST of their services. Click on the link above and then select Gmail from the list.

Also, on the bottom of the standard Gmail application, you can select a "basic HTML" link. This removes most of the Javascript that the standard application is using which is probably your bottleneck.