How to Travel the World and Stay Healthy

Published on September 8, 2014 (↻ February 5, 2024), filed under Adventure (RSS feed for all categories).

The story of my 18 months of travel around the world, including this and other articles, is available as a big but humble e-book: Journey of J.

For long travels, another key beside safety is health. And as my track record in this regard is flawless, essentially, I thought to share a few quick ideas on this, too. (I had the occasional headache or stomachache, but nothing major, and my freak accident in South Africa doesn’t count.)

Disclaimer: I won’t add a disclaimer here because disclaimers seem to assume people are stupid, and may try to evade responsibility. If you elevate me to a doctor, that should be your own problem. But I do want to add that as so often, and as with the ideas about safety, “it depends.” Please use your brain and listen to your guts. 😊

Contents

1. Get Your Health Checked
2. Get Vaccinated
3. Inform Yourself
4. Eat Where Others Eat
5. Clean Your Hands
6. Clean Food and Boxes
7. Don’t Joke About Water
8. Stay in Shape
9. Relax
10. Update (March 8, 2015)

Get Your Health Checked

An important preparatory step, it behooves a traveler to make sure he’s fit to go on a journey in the first place. And as I had touched this in How to Prepare to Travel the World, I’ll only suggest in brevity to see your physician and have yourself checked.

Get Vaccinated

Similarly, make sure to get the vaccines you need for wherever you’re going. Some will be critical, others negligible. Here, too, talk to your doctor or specialized institutions like travel clinics. I don’t want to repeat what I wrote earlier, yet check out CDC’s fantastic graph about travel-related incidence rates.

Inform Yourself

Now, inform yourself about your destinations. This doesn’t need to be heavy-handed; what I found useful is having a quick glance at destination pages on Wikitravel, as they’ll usually warn about major risks. For some things like, say, malaria, one might need to look for information elsewhere (I occasionally google “malaria maps”); similarly, if you have an individual condition, you may need to research the individual threats.

In Kathmandu, for example, where I am while writing this, it seems the water is pretty bad, and so I’m mindful of not drinking from the tap.

Eat Where Others Eat

There are plenty of stories about travelers contracting traveler’s diarrhea, as it does come with a good 20–40% probability. It hit me on my first world tour back in 2012, after having eaten something not-so-good in Hong Kong.

Although street food is not the only concern—and in fact, my own experience had nothing to do with street food—it seems to be a common source of traveler’s diarrhea. A good rule of thumb is, as I had learned from another traveler, to look for places where others eat. Any place may serve good (safe) food that has a few people eating there. Watch out for the places where nobody hangs out. That may well be because of an unworldly time, but here we talk about food safety. If other people eat there, the food is probably okay.

I haven’t had any problems.

Clean Your Hands

Keep your hands clean. Wash them, use hand sanitizer, rinse them with water if necessary. Be conscious of what you touch, or touched before you used the same hands to put something into your mouth. Again, this depends, but you’ll know it when you see it. There are some filthy places on this planet, and there it’s advisable to exercise more caution.

Clean Food and Boxes

Also rather location-dependent, in some places it can be vital to thoroughly clean food (and perhaps consult a few more sources now), and also respective containers.

In some places in Africa and Asia I personally avoid certain fruits and vegetables if these would be eaten raw and don’t come with a shell, and for containers, I might briefly rinse bottles and packages to get dust and some germs off—but I don’t know how effective this last method really is.

Don’t Joke About Water

If not absolutely confident, don’t drink natural or tap water. If locals tell you that it’s safe, and it’s in a more or less “civilized” area, go for it. But otherwise, it’s not even necessarily sound to do what locals do. Use good judgment, but err on the safe side. There are problems with bottled water, but in some places do prefer bottled water to drink, and also to brush your teeth with it.

Stay in Shape

Exercise even—especially—while traveling. This is easier said than done, but if even I, as an extremely light traveler and someone who frowns upon fitness gyms, can pull it off, then you can, too 😉

My recommendation, and personal favorite, is to do a mix of cardio and kickboxing exercises in an high-intensity interval training fashion. I do that once or twice a day for 15 minutes each. Although the exercises, like shadow boxing, require a little space, they can be varied so to even be done in small hostel facilities. For these exercises I’m using the A HIIT Interval Timer app—and for your convenience I uploaded one of my workout plans which you can check out and import if interested.

Relax

Lastly, for what springs to my head, just chill 😊 There is a breathable atmosphere anywhere on Earth, we people eat very similar things, which we need in a healthy format, our bodies are pretty incredible machines, and—waves at food designers—safe processed food, or fast food, is also at hand everywhere. Cheers.

Update (March 8, 2015)

Quick tip: Consider buying some medication, for example against malaria, on site. I, when restocking, paid perhaps one twentieth for my medication when getting it in a malaria country (Kenya), as opposed to my residence back then (United States).

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Please be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)