Not the toilet your hoping for when Montezuma's revenge comes calling. Photo courtesy SpecialKRB

The website for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reads like a horror story for prospective globe trotters.

Anything from Chikungunya Fever to Schistosomiasis could put you on the sidelines (or worse) when you venture out into the world. Of course, with some simple preventative actions – up-to-date vaccinations; maintaining proper sanitary conditions; or even paying attention to what you touch, eat, smell, etc. – most travelers enjoy good health as they explore foreign lands.

The somewhat daunting list on the CDC site is there for a reason, though.

Different parts of the world are home to different bacteria and viruses that our bodies aren’t prepared to combat.  Chikungunya Fever might be fun to pronounce, but modern-day outbreaks of this mosquito-borne illness have affected millions of people from India to Italy with many deaths attributed to the virus. How do you prevent yourself from Chikungunya? Insect repellant.

In Canada, there aren’t many native diseases that foreign travelers have to worry about. As a Canadian pharmacy with years of experience, we haven’t really seen a demand from travelers for drugs that fight common traveling-related illnesses.

For Canadians, our lack of exposure to relatively exotic foreign illnesses is all the more reason to research your travel destination as there are often ailments that are specific to a region. Some health issues are prevalent no matter where you go. Here are a list of five common travel illnesses and how to avoid them:

1. “Montezuma’s Revenge”: Also called Traveler’s Diarrhea (TD)– a name that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. An estimated 10% to 50% of international travelers (or 10 million annually) are struck with TD. While diarrhea itself doesn’t sound too threatening, it can disrupt your vacation at the least and send you to the hospital at the worst. Treatments range from staying hydrated in minor cases to heavy antibiotics in serious cases. The best way to avoid TD is to stay away from sketchy food or beverage and maintain quality hygiene.
2. Cholera: A much more serious type of Traveler’s Diarrhea, cholera is most common in areas of the world with poor sanitation, crowded conditions and famine. Treatment usually involves the administration of fluids (orally or intravenously) to replenish electrolytes. As with TD, you want to avoid questionable food and/or drink and pay attention to sanitary conditions in your area. There are vaccinations for cholera, but they have not proven effective during outbreaks of cholera.
3. Hepatitis: A virus that attacks the liver, Hepatitis is most prevalent in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. There are different types of Hepatitis that vary in severity (from temporary sickness to lifelong disability), but the common thread of conditions that lead to exposure while traveling are contaminated water and food sources. Again, maintaining quality sanitary conditions can greatly reduce exposure and contraction of Hepatitis. There are vaccines available to combat Hepatitis and have proven quite effective. It’s best to research your destination to see if and what type of Hepatitis might be prevalent in that area.
4. Malaria: Another mosquito-borne parasitic illness, Malaria is very widespread. From the U.S. National Library of Medicine: “The disease is a major health problem in much of the tropics and subtropics. The CDC estimates that there are 300-500 million cases of malaria each year, and more than 1 million people die from it. It presents a major disease hazard for travelers to warm climates.” There are anti-malarial medications that you can take prior to traveling to problem-areas, the severity of which depend on where you are headed. Avoiding mosquitoes is one of the best ways to avoid exposure to malaria.
5. Meningitis: Whether bacterial or viral, Meningitis is the inflammation of the lining of the brain. For those with a solid immune system, viral meningitis usually runs its course in a week or two. Bacterial meningitis is far more serious and, untreated in time, can cause irreversible damage or death. Fortunately, there are immunizations against meningitis. According to WorldNomads.com, “Clearly, those traveling to areas know for meningitis risk should do a review of the immunizations and discuss the need for a meningitis vaccine with their health care provider.  Even with vaccines for bacterial meningitis already taken, precautions such as hand washing and not sharing food or drinks are sound advice as the bacterial forms typically spread via saliva and mucous.”

From the serious ailments to the less severe (but still potential vacation-disrupters), there are steps that you can take to avoid having your travels derailed by illness. Very simply, keep yourself, your belongings and your surroundings as clean as possible. Avoid suspect food or beverage. Bring insect repellant. These simple precautions can keep you safe from these five illnesses and more.

Additionally, you should always research the area you are traveling to and review your immunization record if necessary.

I think good old Montezuma’s revenge hits most of us on the road but I haven’t met too many travlers that got HEP or Malaria on the road. What precautions do you take?

The biggest expense you have while traveling is your accommodations and you want to make sure that your getting the best bang for your buck. Your daily costs can fluctuate greatly and often the standard rate that your given at a front desk of a hotel isn’t as good as internet rates. We ended up using quite a few booking sites in order to find the best deal. Recently HotelCalculator.com reached out and asked me to review their site.

My first impressions are positive. The site design is clean and easy to find relevant information. They have an iPhone app which I think is a fantastic feature. There’s many times that I wished I could search for hostels or hotels quickly on my iPhone and the apps that I was using weren’t that great. It also seems like they’re European focused, which is where I saw the greatest variety of prices. We could often get a private hotel room in a 2 or 3 star for the price of a semi-private dorm room with a bit of searching.
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Clean design and great features are important, but at the end of the day it’s the dollars that add up each night. I did a couple of searches for Hotels in Vienna and HotelCalculator came up the same or slightly lower. There were a few hotels that were $10 less expensive per night – which on a $80 CDN room rate isn’t too bad.

They search 20 different online booking sites to get you their best prices. Overall I’m happy with their site and will bookmark them with my other companies I use when searching for the best price. Visit HotelCalculator.com and check them out yourself.

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I read many other peoples travel blogs while we were traveling. When I read Gillian and Jason’s report of Soppong and the Cave Lodge I decided we had to go check it out!

What about you? How do you figure out where you go while traveling? Do you value the advice of blogs over guidebooks? Is there one site that’s inspired you?

Luckily for once we can announce no total failure! Just lots of changes. Read On:

It’s nice to have some down time to plan things out. With such a busy travel schedule all summer there wasn’t a lot of extra time to do planning ahead of where we’re going to next. So now with a nice break in travel and generous relatives letting us stay at their place until we can easily figured out where to go next. With a strong and free Internet connection, access to a fantastic espresso machine and fresh groceries in the fridge, it was the perfect time to sit down and figure things out.

We had a general route figured out earlier to go through Turkey, Egypt, India and then on to Thailand and the rest of Asia. But we didn’t know the costs of travel and accommodation so it took some time to decide what we’d do next. One thing was we spent more money than expected in Europe, with the Euro to Canadian exchange rate being poor and sticker prices being the same or more as back home. Sandwiches in Ireland were €9, beers were often €5-€7 and so on. Basically, we paid the same money as we do back home on things as we did in Europe, which with anyone’s vacation plans that is not what you expect. One tends to travel to places that are cheaper then home. It wasn’t something that we had prepared for, I thought things would just be a bit cheaper. Apparently I was wrong.

We very much wanted to visit Istanbul and see the open-air markets. And go to the Valley of the Kings and view the inscriptions. See the Taj Mahjal and experience the crazy city of Mumbai. But we had to ask ourselves where we really wanted to go, and SE Asia was an area that we just couldn’t miss since it’s an area of the world we have been dreaming about for years. With a clear direction we could start making a plan of where to go and ensure the costs while traveling. With the great exchange rate the Canadian dollar gets in Asia it was looking to be a very easy place to go to on a now very tight budget.

Dee once again used her magic and managed one awesome surprise. While we were looking for the cheapest airline tickets to Bangkok she somehow found some random site we never used before with her amazing Google search skills and low and behold there was an Egypt Air flight out of Frankfurt that had a layover in Cairo that was cheaper then any other flight option on the net. After some investigation we managed to turn that layover into a 6 day stop over in Cairo! The one thing I had really wanted to see this trip was the Pyramids (especially after I saw the movie Zeitgeist), and when it was scratched off our list due to funds I was quietly disappointed. But now after seeing the chance to stay in Cairo and see the Pyramids we booked the flights right away, with the great bonus of it being the cheapest way for us to get to Bangkok!

I really don’t think we would have found this flight unless we had the time to wind down and do some searching while resting. I’m glad that Dee managed to do some good searching on the net and found it! So now our Itinerary looks something like this:

Cairo – 6 nights

Thailand – 60 – 90 days

Cambodia – 15 – 20 days

Vietnam – 20 – 30 days

Laos – 15 – 30 days

Europe has been great, but really it’s similar to life back home. I’m excited to explore something new in Asia, where both language and cultures are extremely different.

And this ends our tales from Europe!! Hope you can enjoyed them and you can look forward to some upcoming exciting posts from our culture shocking time in Cairo, Egypt!!
Off we go to Cairo!! 

Jeremy currently lives in Dayton Ohio and is planning his very own “dream” trip around the world, hoping to embark in August 2010 once he is done his graduate research. Jeremy has already traveled to many countries in his life, but still has mad case of the travel bug.

We had a great time answering Jeremy’s questions and wish him all the luck in the world for his trip preparations and upcoming adventures.

Check out the spotlight here at Jeremy’s blog, and while your at it add his site to your RSS. It’s full of great planning tips and some stories from his past adventures. And if your on twitter, give him a follow!

Thanks again Jeremy for the spotlight!! We look forward to reading your future traveler spotlights and would love the chance to talk again about our Asia experiences once we land back in Canada.

I wish! 

When we were budgeting for this trip, I looked online to see how much items were and figured a decent budget for room, food, beer and entertainment. I looked online and thought I had a grasp on it, but once we hit England the shock of exchange rates really started to get us. Most prices are the same as they are in Canada, but in Pounds rather than Canadian, which is a $2 CDN for every 1 pound. Here’s an example budget for UK with the % after exchange rate conversion of 1.79

1 Beer Pub: £3.50 vs $4.50 (71% more w/exchange)

1 Beer Nightclub:  £5.00 vs $6.00 (66% more w/exchange)

Sandwich in café: £4.95 vs $5.95 (66% more w/exchange)

Fish & Chips: £8.00 vs $9.00 (62% more w/exchange)

Basic Hotel (Traveloge): £69 vs $99 (79% more w/exchange)

And so on. Most prices are similar or 20% less expensive ticket price, but in Pounds versus Canadian dollars so things work out to be roughly 66% more expensive after exchange rate.

If you’re going to the UK, prepare your wallet to turn into an anorexic teen.

About three years ago, on some random night the usual was going on in our routine lives. It was yet another late evening (or early morning) with our friends Steve and Karen and we had just got back from some drum and bass show and were now looking for some chill out time. But on this random night, instead of talking about how good the DJ was, or how we were not looking forward to work on Monday we instead shared our dream with them on how we wanted to take an epic trip across the world.

This topic of conversation then inspired Steve to tell us about different huge drum & bass festivals he has heard about over in Europe, Sun and Bass, Innovation in the Sun, Hospitality Nights, Valve Sound System, etc. And of course also how all our wish list DJ’s are just locals over in Europe.

Many more random nights of the same went by but all through them we continued to talk about how awesome it would be to witness these shows with our own eyes. To the point we agreed the best way to experience them would be together as the 4 of us. And so the seed was planted! Scott and I still had the dream to travel the world and now our friends Karen and Steve had their own little dream to travel Europe with us.

For about a year the seed didn’t look like it would ever grow and become reality until one random end of the summer night. We were already not looking forward to cold winter and how it would be great to escape the cold and hit a beach together. Much to my surprise this “hopeful speaking” actually turned into a reality and that November we meet up with them in Punta Cana! From this moment I knew our hopeful Europe speaking would become a reality. It was all a matter of when.

Before we knew it we where actually setting dreams into plans. Picking tentative dates, places to go, things we must do, researching events to attend, and then choosing the location to start it all… and of course of all the places in Europe to choose from. We choose Amsterdam to set us off on the right foot.
Finally on a warm summer day in August of 2009 we got off a train in Amsterdam and like it was out of some teenage summer movie we saw our friends down at the end of the walkway with the same travel tired weary smiles as us.

And so begins the next leg in our adventure…. Surrounded by the comfort of our friends.

And there is oh so many more to go!

Well, as some of your might of noticed… Scott and I are EXTREMELY far behind in our blog postings. Our anniversary in Venice was on August 5. That makes this blog 2 months behind. Holy crap!

We have been some busy travelers. But now we have slowed down to an almost halt. Our friends have flown back to Canada and our Eurail passes have expired. So, we are back in Baden Baden for awhile and staying in my relatives guest apartment which has a constant internet connection. (something we didn’t come across too often in our travels)

It’s now time to immerse ourselves in a bunch of good for you R’s. Relax, Recharge, and more importantly research! With Europe now a been there done that concept it’s time to figure out our next leg of adventures. Shall we go to Eygpt? India? S.E. Asia? All would be nice but Europe really took a bite out of our budget…. thus why we have taken a mandatory pitstop so we can really look everything over and make some smart decisions.

Guess what this means for you the reader! It means we are also going to take this down time opportunity to catch ourselves up on this blog. So stay tuned for great stories, photos and video coming up real quick.

Some topics to tap your finger and wait for:

• Getting Creeped out in Vienna
• Mountain Climbing in Prague
• Pumping Muscles in Brussels
• Participating in our own “Tour de France”
• Our thoughts to Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver, and Steve Jobs
• Essential Clean Ups in London
• A Sanctuary that Belongs to the Cats
• Oktoberfest Insanity
• The beautiful under belly of Berlin
• and so much more!!

Moving isn’t easy in the first place and it’s even more stressful when you are moving your stuff yet have no home… you enter the large conundrum of what to do with your stuff.

Our options were as follows:

1. Rent our condo out as a furnished suite
2. Rent a storage space
3. Sell all of our stuff
4. Try to fit as much stuff as we can in our condo’s storage locker and then find a loving family member to store the rest for us

In the end we went with option 1 and 4. We found some fantastic renters for our condo that stated they didn’t have much in terms of furniture. So, we left behind some useful items for them that would be a bit of a nuisance to store someplace else. Items like our kitchen table and chairs, breakfast bar stools, some ikea bookshelves, entertainment stand, patio furniture, etc.

We then filled our storage locker with as many boxes as we possibly could. If it was a Tetris game we would of scored some killer ass points.

And all the rest of our items and boxes were moved into a truck and brought to my parents house.

I must send out a HUGE THANKS to my parents for taking on our stuff for the year. They already had a pretty full house but somehow manage to fit our stuff into it too.

Being able to store our stuff in my parents homes has saved us thousands of dollars in storage rental fees, and/or the hassle to coming back home in a year and needing to go buy our things all over again when money will be super tight.

So… THANK YOU MOM & DAD!!! You have been a huge, huge help. We might still be in Canada if it wasn’t for you.

I would also like to send out a big thank you to our friend Alex who helped us on our moving day, along with a huge pile of other things in regards to our final trip preparations. Again, if we didn’t have you we would still be in Canada! THANK YOU.

Also, a grateful thanks to Scott’s mom for handling some misc paperwork etc for us while we are gone.

“0 Days Until You Fly Out Of Canada”

Finally the day I have been dreaming about for a long time has finally come!

Of course we still have a few last things to do here in Calgary before we jump on that plane…. but nothing at all compared to the amount of stuff being thrown at us at once last week!! I swear the final days before we left Vancouver were some of the hardest days I’ve experienced in my life! But so worth it!!

Feeling great, Calgary has been a blast. Super nice to see a bunch of friends and some family but now we are stoked to finally hop over the pond to…. Dublin!!! Woo Hoo!

Time to get some sleep, and then get through one last final push of preparations.

Can’t wait to finally start blogging about our travels!!