Beware the ice on a hot day in India
Hot days in India are pretty much every day, and if you venture down south, India has temperatures that can literally allow you to fry an egg on a stone in the middle of the day. In fact, there are legendary stories – difficult to verify as true or false – that there are breezes in India that are so hot that if you are hit by one, you will die on the spot. But not to worry, there are ways to escape the heat of the summer sun in India that gave rise to the phrase “only fit for mad dogs and Englishmen”. But beware of how you deal with the heat, because another thing that can and will make you very uncomfortable is the stomach bug so common for tourists in India.
The first thing you want to do – and the most important thing to do from a health standpoint – when you feel too hot is to hydrate your body with a cool drink of water. The more you drink water, the more your body can deal with oppressive heat. But if you drink ordinary tap water in India, you are also ingesting lots of microbes that might make you sick. So it is advised to always drink bottled and purified water, instead. So if you are suffering from the heat, and someone offers you ice to add to your water, beware. The ice was made from water, too, and may contain ordinary tap water. If you drink and iced drink, even if it doesn’t have any other water in it, you can accidentally get sick from the ice in the drink. To be really safe, drink fresh coconut milk, straight from the coconut.