AdventureCast at DareToGo.com

Episode 6 of AdventureCast at DareToGo.com.

As you laugh around the campfire with your friends, the smile suddenly slides off your face. Everyone else continues to joke around, but you can’t hear them. Your attention is focussed entirely on the rumble you just felt deep within your bowels. You’re about to excuse yourself, when all of a sudden the sense of urgency becomes overwheming. You jump up and run for the woods with a yelp, not hearing your friends calling after you. Struggling with your belt, you howl as you realize you’re too late.

You have Traveler’s diarrhea.

What causes Traveler’s diarrhea? How do you get it? More importantly, what’s the best way to deal with it? This week’s podcast explores this topic, and discusses ways to prevent the above scenario from occurring.

Listen in to learn more!

Episode 5 of AdventureCast at DareToGo.com discusses unorthodox uses for everyday items.

So you went out to the jungle and cracked your glasses. Lame. Now what do you do? Crack open the toothpaste and slap it on! This week is all about finding alternative uses for things you likely have in your backpack. Listen in!

Episode 4 of AdventureCast at DareToGo.com talks all about dehydration and heatstroke. Listen in to learn about symptoms and prevention methods.

So you’re out in the jungle, and your head starts to pound. You think it’s fine, so you don’t say anything to any of your friends. You start to get disoriented and fuzzy-headed. Your skin is getting flushed and you feel like you’re going to pass out. Your friends are concerned and are asking you if you’re okay, but you’re not able to respond. It would be so much better if you could sit down…just for a moment.

Dude, you’ve got heatstroke, and you’re in trouble. Listen in for tips!

An old (and dear) friend wrote me today and asked me to write about safety tips for Eastern Europe. Apparently she’s ditching Canada and headed off to the Czech Republic for a kick ass job. It would take me a very long time to cover specifics about each and every country, and there’s some very good resources on the Internet that already do. So I’m gonna stick to this week’s topic, “personal security”. I’ll present some links over the next few days, and talk in more general terms about how to avoid scams.

The Overseas Security Advisory Council is an American site that goes into fantastic detail about the state of security on a country-by-country basis. This is a great first stop. The site provides the latest news feeds that pertain to overseas danger, and contains annual security briefs under the reports section. Information here is relatively current, and does contain some specifics on local scams or immediate threats to tourists. An excerpt from the 2007 Crime and Safety Report for Prague (for example hehe), states:

“Visitors who frequent the local drinking establishments should be alert if purchasing drinks for women who work in the bars. Unsuspecting customers have been charged up to US $1500 for these ‘bargirl’ drinks.”

The report goes on to say…

“In a common scenario, the scam artist approaches the victim and offers to change money. Immediately after the approach, an accomplice will appear and identify himself as an ‘undercover police officer’ investigating illegal money changing. The ‘police officer’ will threaten the money changer with arrest and demand to see the victim’s money in order to examine it for counterfeit. During the examination, the ‘undercover officer’ deftly palms some of the bills and returns the rest with a verbal warning to avoid changing money on the streets.”

I’ve gotten into the habit of checking this site religiously before I head to a place I haven’t been before. It’s awesome because sooner or later the inevitable happens and some obnoxious pinhead tries to pull a fast one on you. Because you’ve done your homework, you’re already hip to what’s going to happen, and you don’t even bother getting drawn in.

OSAC doesn’t stop with just security reports. There’s an absolute ton of stuff on the site, ranging from health to natural disasters. It’s well worth a read each and every time you’re planning a trip. And not just to Prague.

Episode 3 of AdventureCast at DareToGo.com gives tips on personal security.

Woot! Third podcast all laid out and ready to go. The theme for the week is personal security, and I’ll be throwing out basic travel safety pointers. Most of what we’ll discuss this week is pretty common sense, but it doesn’t hurt to go over it again.

When you put yourself out in the open in a strange city, you start your trip with a great big scarlet bullseye plastered to your chest. Crooks and petty thieves can spot that bullseye from a mile away, and they’ll hone right in on you unless you take steps to minimize your exposure. The basic message this week is, “don’t look like a tourist”.

Where do you get cash when you travel? It depends on where you’re going, really. Someone asked me recently if they accepted Canadian money in Kathmandu. My response to that was, um, unlikely. Pretty much every major city has ATMs, so if that’s the extent of your itinerary, you’re probably fine. Although even then, I recall the Citibank ATMs in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the late 90s only spat out US$100 bills. Not sure if that’s changed or not, but given that there’s nothing in Vietnam you can buy on the street comes close to costing $100, that’s a bit of a problem. The salacious grins of the locals when they say they can’t make change speak volumes.

While most major cities have ATMs, not all of them do. It really depends on how far away you’re headed from conventional infrastructure.

Here’s some tips for planning out your day-to-day spending on the road:

• Make sure your credit cards are paid off before you leave.
• Make sure there’s cash in your bank account that you can withdraw with your ATM card.
• Find out in advance whether your destination is a cash-oriented culture or if plastic is widely accepted. Assume nothing.
• Change some money into the local currency before you leave. It will cover things like a taxi to your hotel on arrival.
• If you’re headed to any country that doesn’t have a solid infrastructure, get yourself a stack of US$1.00 bills before you leave. You can get more at your hotel if necessary, but you’ll need these for tips…in some places you’ll need a lot.
• Not every country has ATMs, and some places frown on giving cash advances on credit cards. If you’re headed to a country that doesn’t have a solid infrastructure, call or write your hotel in advance and ask them the best approach. They may suggest you bring either traveler’s cheques or cash. Follow their advice, and plan to bring 10%-15% more than you think you’ll actually need.

Spending a little time during your travel planning to figure out how you’re going to pay for things will save a lot of hassle after you leave.

My first solo trip, before I moved overseas, was a trip to Aruba. I recall making lots of mistakes there, not least of which was riding my crappy jeep up onto a boulder in the desert heat and getting stuck, but right up to the end, as I was about to board the plane home, I got sent back because I’d thrown away my immigration card. I just thought it was a junk receipt or something, so I chucked it. Well done.

Immigration can be a bit of a pain in the ass, but it’s a necessary evil that goes with travelling. In addition to carrying a passport that’s valid for at least six months, some countries will require many, many other things before they’ll let you set foot on their soil. Some of the things you might be required to have on you when you arrive are:

• one or more visas (government approval for you to visit the country in question)
• immunization records (with or without specific inoculation certificates)
• return airline tickets
• passport photos
• copy of hotel reservations
• receipts for all the crap in your luggage
• letters from your company saying why you need to be there
• bank statements that show you have sufficient funds to handle yourself

Naturally any or all of the above will take time to get, so if you’re planning to leave your home country, you need to allow enough time to attend to any or all of the items in the above list, before your departure. While much of these items you can arrange for fairly quickly, a visa can take quite a long time to procure, depending on a) your destination and b) what your destination’s government thinks of your home country.

Visas often depend on the passport you hold, and the purpose of your visit. Persons holding British passports, for example, allow visa-free access to many countries that would require a visa for American citizens. To write this post, I searched all over the Internet for a listing of entry requirements by country. But such a list would be enormous given the variables involved. However, Travel Document Systems is an American company that specializes in visa, passport and immigration document processing, and their website provides a comprehensive list of country-by-country entry requirements for both Americans and non-Americans.

Once you’ve decided on a destination, spend some time checking what sorts of things your destination’s government requires, and leave enough time to arrange for them so you’re not stuck at the border dealing with a monstrous hassle. Some countries might even put you on the next plane right back home at your own expense if you haven’t planned properly! So do your homework.

I’ve been caught in a few riots now. Vancouver in 1994 and Jakarta in 1998 are the more vivid ones that come to mind. They’re really not cool…even if I’d been in the market for a new TV they wouldn’t have been cool. On both occasions I felt completely detached from reality. I mean, the buildings around me, the shops, the signs…all of it was everyday-familiar, except the entire human race had been replaced with raving, drooling pod people trashing everything in sight. It was like I’d dropped some bad acid and jumped headlong through the looking glass.

When I look back on those events, nobody should have been surprised. In 1994 I even remember sitting in a restaurant the day before saying, “if Vancouver loses the game tomorrow it’s gonna be bad”. Sure enough…

While you can’t predict a riot breaking out with certainty, if you’re well enough informed, you can certainly gauge the likelihood of one. Think of civil unrest like a bomb. Anything that captures the collective mind of a large group of people, gets them excited and causes them to assemble en masse creates the fuse. This would include:

• political or corporate oppression: wait for the straw that breaks the camel’s back
• minority oppression: every country has its own sets of minorities…they get frustrated too
• economic suffering: especially a sudden and extreme economic change for the worse
• dashed hopes: anticipated sports events gone awry…Vancouver, how you shamed me
• public outrage: think Paul Barnardo and Rodney King

A fuse is no good without a spark. In most cases, excited people congregate, demonstrate, and then disperse on their own. However, if the conditions are right, and the fuse gets lit, things can turn ugly real fast. The Miami Police Department identified seven elements of civil unrest.

Locals are generally hip to what’s going on. They’ll know if something bad could happen because they’ve been living with their issues every day. They can choose to stay away from places they think might erupt. Travelers, on the other hand, are often blissfully ignorant of the plights of locals. That’s a problem because once the fuse is lit, the riot bomb can explode very, very fast. If a traveler is caught, he or she has no choice but to deal with it, and try to avoid the bullets.

I can’t jump up and down enough about the need for current information about places you’re bound for. Books are okay, but the problem with books is that they’re only current as at the date of publication. The news is where it’s at. Be ravenous for news before you leave. Find out what’s going on in the city, get a feel for what the locals have to put up with. You might decide to make different travel arrangements, or try and get better security for yourself. If you think there’s a likelihood of trouble brewing in certain neighbourhoods, avoid those areas. If you think it’s gonna be bad city-wide, maybe you want to scrap the trip altogether, or go someplace else.

Trust me, it’s one rabbit hole you don’t want to go down.

So I said this week was all about travel planning. A big part of that is figuring out what you need to do ahead of time, and what can wait until after you leave. Generally, once you’ve booked your flight, you’re stuck with that date, so if you haven’t allowed yourself enough time to take care of the up front stuff, you’re in a jam.

Dr. Mark Wise has put together a pretty awesome site. In it, he outlines a variety of rather nasty bugs you can pick up, and inoculations you can get to avoid them.

You can get some of these vaccines in a single visit. Some, however, have to be spread out according to a set schedule. If you go to the doctor for a vaccine against Japanese encephalitis, and you’re getting on a plane in less than a week, he might refuse to give it to you. Japanese encephalitis inoculation consists of three injections: the second 7 days following the first, and the third 28 days following the second. So you need to get the first jab up to 36 days before you leave if you expect the vaccine to be effective. That’s a problem if you left the doctor’s visit until the last minute and you’re headed for backwoods Laos tomorrow.

I’m not going to go into tremendous detail here on what each horrid disease can do to you (but I will link to the CDC). Since this week is about travel planning, I’ve put together this handy list of inoculation schedules so that hopefully you can figure out how much time you need to leave yourself before you step on that plane. I hope you find it useful!

Bear in mind that your doctor will ultimately be the one to recommend treatment. The reason for this schedule is so that you can plan enough time to see him or her to figure out what your treatments or vaccines will be (he or she may also advise that you don’t need any kind of vaccine at all, depending on your itinerary). Also bear in mind that medical technology changes often. I’ve done my best to be accurate, but I’m not a doctor, and my information may be out of date. Let your doctor in on your full itinerary, and work with him or her to develop your personal immunization plan.

Episode 2 of the AdventureCast at DareToGo.com.

So I am very excited. Got my very second podcast loaded up, and have the blog all planned out. This week, all week, we’re looking at travel planning from a high level and the broad categories of things to consider. Among them are:

• disease and health
• civil situations
• local economies
• local cultures
• weather
• administration

Over the course of this week, I’ll be writing more details on planning for those topics as they occur to me. Cheers!
(*excited, excited, excited*)