Affordable Travel

If you are traveling to another country, health care can and should be a concern. You can visit some places like Canada and the UK that offer some of the best public health care policies of any place on earth, especially compared to rather tight-fisted and exclusive plans in places like the USA, where we have known friends who died due to a lack of urgent health care, because they didn’t have insurance or cash on them when they were in need. You certainly don’t want to run that kind of risk, and there are insurance companies that will offer you health coverage for travel, but you have to check the small print on their rules very carefully.

Some will arrange for you to be flown back home by an air ambulance, others will cover your hospital stay and surgery wherever you are, and some will do both. Others will say, “we will cover one trip to the doctor and one emergency room visit put that’s all.” The first thing to do before you travel is to contact the place you’re going, and find out how their health care system can help you if you are in need. For instance you may have no coverage in Guatemala, but the cost of a hospital visit is about 7 times less than what you might pay in the USA. Then again, the nation of Guatemala has 22 official hospitals, and only 4 of them have even simple X ray equipment. Many don’t have medicines.

Do your homework ahead of time, pack your own meds, and get whatever inoculations you need. Then travel and have a good safe trip.

The Mayan culture of Central America, known around the world for the magnificent stone-stacked temples still standing in the middle of the rain forest jungles of Mexico and Guatemala, is the oldest indigenous culture in the world. As other civilizations have come and gone across the march of time, Mayan culture has not only withstood those who tried to conquer it, but has absorbed them into its ever-widening cultural heritage. The modern-day Mayans make the most intricate and colorful textiles in the world. Anthropologists and historians study the culture the Mayans celebrate in rituals of song, dance, culinary arts, and music, with both amazement and profound respect.
But few know the simplest beauty secret of the Mayans, and those who do tend to guard it for themselves. Read on, as we reveal it to you in all its sweet and natural simplicity.
In Central America, sugar cane is grown and harvested both as an exported cash crop and for local use in cooking. While visiting the ancient city of Antigua, Guatemala, a town renowned for its 500-year-old Spanish Colonial architecture and active volcanoes, we met a native woman with skin so perfect that she looked 10 years younger than her actual age. She was more than happy to share her beauty secret, and we were delighted to find out that it was not only simple, but that the necessary products were practically free, and available at every grocery store, coffee shop, and restaurant on the planet.
She taught us that the Mayans have used granulated sugar, particularly raw sugar, for hundreds of years, to exfoliate the skin in an organic way. So if you want to enjoy fun in the sun of Central America, but don’t want your skin to wrinkle, take a hint from the hosts, and add some sweet tonic to your skin.

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.

If you are a traveler, you know that a long plane ride or cramped bus or train seat can leave you aching – literally – for a good stretch and workout when you finally arrive at your destination. And many hotels offer gyms, swimming pools, and other options to help you get some needed physical exercise while you are on the road. But sometimes you are stuck without ample facilities to get a good workout, and at such times it is a great idea to have some simple and no-frills exercise programs to keep you going strong.

One great way to exercise, even if you are just laid over in an airport, is to use the increasingly popular exercise rubber bands that are sold to pilates students. These rubber bands, rubber tubes, and other forms of stretchy – put highly resistant – rubber exercise training aids are easy to carry with you, don’t set off the metal detectors, and offer great isometric workout options. Just pull them out, find a quiet corner of the airport or wherever you happen to be, and do a routine. They give you a workout similar to the kind you get from lifting weights, but they depend upon the strength of resistance, so the bands themselves are easy to transport, lightweight, and it is hard to injure yourself by straining while using them.

So find a set of exercise bands, learn a few routine exercises, and you will never want for a good aerobic and isometric workout, not matter where your travels lead you.