I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bangkok-pollut...
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
Do people talk that crime exists? For sure. You have to be smart, just like any other big city. But I don't see how you'd truly put yourself into a dangerous situation. There's lots of security everywhere westerners might hang out.
Airport has seen lots of improvements recently.
But yes, traffic is horrendous, public transit as well.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
It's pretty easy to spend a year in SEA without raising eyebrows at any border if you're willing to change countries somewhat often and don't mind AirAsia flights.
The problem for me personally is this life is stressful on relationships, health, and personal productivity. Spending a weekend every 1-2 months to deal with travel (and arrangements) is exhausting and expensive on productivity hours.
Think you mean Delhi NCR? New Delhi is pretty small, and mostly houses political and social elite.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
It's a great example how "on paper" metrics don't match reality but it's hardly surprising given that manipulating paper is the entire function of the country.
I wonder what people would think if I said that about London, if I only visited central London and said 'it feels like a tourist trap'. London is huge, as is Singapore (for a city, it's pretty big— it has a larger population than all of the Baltics and the Nordic except Sweden).
Singapore is not North Korea, the PRC, or any of the Gulf countries, where people just get disappeared (or sawn into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase) for 'criticising the government' or 'criticising the country'.
I am Singaporean.
I can absolutely call the ruling People's Action Party a bunch of ivory tower-dwelling bureaucrats who have lost touch with the issues of the populace, and are mostly far cry from Lee Kuan Yew's days. I can say that Ms Josephine Teo really needs to keep her mouth shut, and that Mr Ng Chee Meng, MP for Jalan Kayu, didn't deserve to win his constituency one jot. I can say the ruling party regularly gerrymander the districts so they keep winning, even though they deny it. I can say they stifle the development of creative pursuits and the arts with their heavy-handed censorship. I can say they have their vices backwards by being extremely light on drink-driving, but simultaneously extremely harsh on cannabis, which smells horrible but isn't a big problem in terms of addiction or withdrawal.
I can say they are strongly influenced by Anglospheric right-wing Christian evangelism, and they need to root it out before it settles too deep into the country's psyche. I can say they are trying to build a cult of personality of Lee Kuan Yew, who has been dead for 10 years; it's time the country, the government, and the ruling party built on his legacy and moved forward instead of circling around him and his memory.
If you want more criticism, how about actually watching the Singapore Parliament, and deciding for yourself?
Oh, and if you ever decide to drop by, leave the hard drugs at home (including weed), if you want to leave with your head on its neck.
As for metrics: Singapore is both on paper and in reality a pretty good place to live, if you can stand the humidity and heat (frankly, that's the only truly oppressive thing about the place, how ruddy hot it gets). Why do you think people still emigrate to it, from lower-income countries, and from the West?
And finally, 'bald JD Vance', I don't understand how US politics is related to Singapore. They are countries hemispheres apart. One occupies a full third of a continent and has a population of 350 million. The other is a tiny island city-state of 6 million.
The politics of the US have also degraded to something worse than sports rivalries and the discourse is generally of extremely poor quality; it is only a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of its leadership and the majority of its people.
A substantial proportion of those would like to become PR or even citizens, but can't risk prejudicing an already-opaque process in doing so.