9 Blindingly Obvious Ways To Stay Healthy Travelling the Tropics
1: Eat fruit and vegetables to keep your vitamins up.
2: Get enough sleep. Late-night drinking and early morning buses are a toxic combination.
3: Get the right jabs and keep them up to date. Your chances of contracting (eg) typhoid are, admittedly, pretty low in many places. But many insurance providers won’t pay for treatment if you aren’t vaccinated. Travel injections are ultra-cheap in Asia, and far cheaper in Europe than in the US.
4: Use anti-malarials -– both a DEET-based repellent and a pharmaceutical such as Malarone or Doxycycline — but only if you are travelling in regions in which you are actually at risk of malaria.
Many capital cities and resort areas have eradicated malaria and the malaria mosquito is not found at altitude. See the NHS malaria map for country by country breakdowns of which areas are at risk and take the tablets for the recommended time before entering and after leaving the region.
5: Eat at busy places with a high food turnover and a regular clientele. Don’t eat anything cold that’s meant to be hot, or anything hot that’s meant to be cold.
6: Don’t sweat food hygiene. You’ll miss out on delicious street food and eating with locals, then the first time you hit a wet lettuce leaf you’ll be sick as a dog. Acclimatize your immune system to the local bacteria (good and bad) in stages.
7: Drink lots of clean water to make up for what you sweat out. Don’t drink unboiled or unsterilised mains water unless locals confirm it’s safe to drink (which it surprisingly often is).
8: Be ultra-cautious around natural remedies. There’s a common assumption that products sold as “natural” are safe and non-pharmaceutical. This eyeopening report by a pathologist shows quite how untrue this is of an industry often as greedy as and always less regulated than Big Pharma.
9: Clean cuts thoroughly and paint deep cuts with surgical alcohol or iodine. Cover deep cuts during the day and let them dry at night.
And, finally, and obviously – get travel insurance! It could save your life.
Refreshingly practical. I did get I’ll twice from ice and water but never had trouble with food cooked on the road or beach. And it is wonderful to experience what real people eat! If you can’t enjoy the food, why travel?!?
Interesting, and thanks! So glad you’re with me on the street food thing. I’ve never had a problem with ice — I tend to figure anywhere sophisticated to be making drinks with ice is not going to be using dangerous tap water to do so (though i’m sure the blocks acquire some interesting elements when they’re dragged around from place to place).
Nice tips 🙂 I agree, they are really practical tips when traveling to tropical areas. And the photo… hilarious. LOL.
Thanks! That is a very typical Indonesian bathroom. Not a place where one would like to spend more time than one had too, though.
Yes tips we should all follow – reminds me to get ready for my trip to Laos in a few weeks so I’m prepared for the humidity and my vacinations are up to date
Yep. Do not forget to get the rabies one done…
We’ve never been that good about vaccinations when traveling abroad. In India we didn’t take anti-malaria medicine, but it was kind of nerve-wracking every time we saw a mosquito. 😛
On our upcoming trip to India and Thailand, I’m really not sure what kind of shots we’ll get. It’s scary to think of what we might catch without them, but it’s such a hassle to actually get them…. and then you don’t even know if you’ll need them!
Cheapest way to do shots is to get them done in Asia: do them in BKK when you arrive, if that’s where you’re flying into. Wes recommends somewhere on http://www.johnnyvagabond.com. Don’t know if you saw Maryanne’s comment on my evil monkeys piece, but she got bitten by one and had to have the non-vaccinated person treatment for rabies. A month of shots. $1500. Insurance wouldn’t pay cos she hadn’t updated the jabs. Thing is, you never know whether you need them or not. Yellow Fever is, I think, mainly for the paperwork when crossing borders… And, yeah, the only foolproof way to avoid malaria is not to get bitten or to stay out of malarial regions. But anti-malarials do massively reduce your risk of contracting it if you are…
We travel with clove capsules which naturally kills bacteria that causes dysentery. Out of 2 years of traveling through Mexico, Central America and South America, we’ve never gotten sick. Anytime we’ve felt a stomach grumbling we’ve eaten our cloves and voila! No diarrhea, where others have been effected. It’s a good, natural remedy and should be a foot note to #8
Thanks, Lainie! That’s a great tip, and we’ll give it a go. We picked fresh clove buds in the Spice Islands, where they use both leaves and buds for all sorts of things, including stomach trouble, and they’re also a key element in the 19th century bitters medical formulations (and the oil was used against toothache until recently in the UK). With a taste and a scent like that, they’ve got to have some fairly potent alkaloids in them. (As does cinnamon. Z is barred from eating too much as it sends him hyper.)
Good tips. They might be obvious, but sometimes we let our guard down. Thanks for the reminders!
Thank you. It’s amazing how many people don’t do the fruit & veg stuff.
Oh I need to buy vitamins! Nice work, sound advice but so practical (i.e. don’t sweat food hygiene) no one should say no to street food!
Yep. South American fruit can be amazing, but sometimes it’s bloody hard to find.
My advice — stay away from salads of any kind! I let my guard down to enjoy a Caesar salad on my last day in Guatemala (it was a nice hotel restaurant), and ended up plus one bacteria, and minus 30 pounds.
I’m with Ayngelina and the vitamins…:>)
We actually eat salads, raw seafood, unpeeled fruit, all the other stuff you’re not supposed to do. But we didn’t start by doing that. Build up with street food, brushing your teeth in tap water, etc, and you’ll cultivate immunity to the bacteria that hang around, and be able to eat almost anything without getting sick. And, if you do hit something your immune system objects to, it will, erm, dispose of it painlessly in under an hour, leaving you right as rain.