Affordable Travel

So you have spent the whole day or more traveling across country, in dirty and dusty buses or without adequate chances to shower because you were camping or sleeping in your car, and you are in hot tropical locations where it would be so refreshing to finally take a real nice long hot shower. You book a room for the night with a private bath and are anticipating the shower as it is was a tryst with a long lost mate. You crank up the knobs and the water pressure is powerful, but just as you step inside the shower you notice some really whacky looking electrical work around the shower head and you begin to have serious second thoughts about putting your toe into the water, because you have seen enough movies and read enough novels about electrocution by having a gadget like a radio or hair drier fall into a bathtub.  Plus, others have warned you since you were just a little kid about the possibility it could happen to you and fry you to a crisp with your hair standing on end. That is the same reason why near kitchen sinks or in bathrooms in places like the USA, it is a building inspector code - now always enforced - that electrical outlets have to emergency shut off mechanisms to prevent death by jolting 110 or 220 voltage.

Here is the deal: in many places where they can’t afford fancy hot water systems, they just put a little electrical gadget on the shower head and it heats the water as it travels through the shower head, making it at least warm enough to be comfy and sometimes making it actually very nice and steamy. But the wiring job often involves some simple red and black wire and lots of cheap black electrical tape. There is water everywhere, so the possibility does exist for getting shocked if the wires aren’t properly grounded or are exposed. What to do? Well, that depends on your level of risk versus your level of wanting a nice shower, most of the time. If you are not an experienced electrician, you wind up trusting fate in most cases. They wouldn’t have the gadgets if people got killed all time, right? Personally this writer avoided the first one and then used others for months on end, and only once did he get a little buzz from the water…not enough to hurt, just enough to make him feel juiced up without drinking espresso.

Email is certainly the fastest, cheapest, and most convenient way to stay in touch as you travel away from home, and if you have an email account and can get access to the Internet in a library, cyber caf‚, hotel, or bookstore, you can check your email and send messages to others from almost anywhere on the planet. In order to use the same email account that you are used to using when you are at home or at your office, you should check with your service provider before you travel, and learn the methods they offer for using what is known as “web based” email. With this web-based feature, you can connect to the Internet from anywhere, and then go to the home page of the company that provides your Internet service at home. Once you are on the home page, you can follow the procedures - usually by just clicking on a few directional tabs to guide you to the part of the site where email is available - and check your email, the same you would check it from home. Because you are using a webpage of the company that provides your email service, you don’t have to worry about downloading to your own home based computer. And you can still take advantage of organizational features such as file folders for keeping copies of your emails, multiple email address aliases, and spam filters, while using the web based style email features. Some people get so used to using it while traveling that they keep using the home paged based web mail method even when they get home.

Not too long ago you could rent a very large house in historic Antigua for less than $300. Now you are lucky to find a one bedroom apartment in the old part of town for that price, because so many tourists have moved there to take advantage of the low cost of living and the beautiful quality of life that can be had by those who have money and move into this resort-oriented town. Although life in Antigua for most people - the local natives - is still especially difficult, in a nation where most of the population lives in poverty, for those who have wealth, or even a moderate income based on the standards of major industrialized nations, life is quite luxurious.

Rentals or leases in historic Antigua in 2004 had risen sharply from the year before, and now you can rent a very comfortable two bedroom dwelling for about $500-$600 dollars, or a rather posh and elegant colonial dwelling with updated amenities, for twice that amount. You will have easy access to the downtown area, and the infrastructure for high speed Internet access and cell phone service is excellent.

Of course if you want to save money, you can easily find off-season rentals by the month for about $200, that provide you with a private room and a private or shared bathroom, kitchen privileges, a furnished accommodation, maid service, and utilities such as electricity.

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.

One way to see the world and not have to worry about losing income by being on vacation the whole time, is to work as a house sitter for someone in a foreign country. Many people travel for work or fun, and are away from home for extended periods of time, making it necessary for them to find someone – often a person paid a hefty sum – to look after their home while they are away. Responsibilities include those that any home owner is used to doing for themselves: taking care of getting the bills paid on time, fixing minor repairs like leaky faucets, and ensuring that the houseplants, gardens, and pets are well taken care of while the owner is away from home.

If you happen to meet someone who is traveling – a very easy thing to do if you are also traveling on vacation in a popular holiday destination – consider swapping house space with them, and letting them hire you as their house sitter, in exchange for lodging. For example, if you are in New York and you meet someone from London who is going to be there for a few months each year for study or work, you can make an arrangement to stay in their home in London while they are away. This gives you a chance to live in London for a discounted (or even free) lodging expense, while you work as their house sitter. And it gives them the peace of mind of knowing that somebody is home, taking care of things while they are away.