We often get asked if we got sick during our travels and what we did when that happened. Our basic strategy was not to get sick and this is what this post is all about.

Before you leave on your trip

Although these tips are not all to help you stay healthy, all our pre-trip tips are to make any health issues on the road (hopefully you won’t have any) easier to handle.

Call your doctor - Basically, ask you primary care provider if you need vaccines, or meds, for the region(s) you are traveling to. If you need anything, you’ll generally need to go to the office and if you don’t, then you don’t have to. Most likely they’ll recommend:
- Vaccines: Make sure you have enough time to have vaccine be ‘active’. For example, the yellow fever vaccine must be taken 10 days before you arrive to a yellow fever infected area; don’t wait until the last minute.
- Medications like Malaria pills for Malaria affected areas.
Prescription medications - Bring all the prescription meds you’ll need; don’t assume you can get your prescription meds easily abroad. By the same token, don’t over pack. You can get over the counter medications like ibuprofen pretty much everywhere. Bring a doctors note, or your prescription receipt, just in case customs asks you what have. If it’s just a few pills, they probably won’t hassle you, but if you have a lot of pills & containers, it’ll just make everything smoother.
Get travel insurance - travel insurance is actually very affordable when you are not covering the items you are traveling with, and the trip itself. Often times credit cards will automatically have trip insurance for any trip related expenses you paid using that card. Definitely check your credit card perks. In our case, we didn’t care that our ‘things’ weren’t covered b/c we didn’t have a lot of expensive items that we didn’t feel we could replace ourselves. However, medical expenses are beyond something we felt we could replace ourselves so we wanted to be covered for Emergency Medical (like a heart attack, or a broken leg) and Emergency Transportation (natural disasters or emergency evacuation from places like remote hikes)
Here is a sample, from Allianz, of a 10 day trip with an estimated value of USD $500; obviously your trip probably cost much more, but this ‘trip value’ is just for what you’ll get reimbursed in case of cancellation. You can see that if you buy the Premier tier, you’ll get USD $50,000 in emergency medical expenses covered and USD $1,000,000 emergency transportation. For us, the medical part was the most important and as you can see, it’s very affordable to be covered. This is not a sponsored post - we just want to share how you can make travel insurance cover you for the things that matter most.

Finally on your trip

Yay! You are all excited, there is so much to do! So many things to see! So much food to try! We get ya, so we’ll keep things brief as far as recommendations go:

Don’t get dog sick - If you feel that you are feeling a tiny bit under the weather, get a little rest to try to recover. This small investment of time could be all that you need to get over that hump instead of getting super sick. Missing one site, is better than feeling sick at all the sites you visit.
Get enough sleep - adjust as quickly as you can to the time change (if you have one) and get good, restorative sleep, maybe not every night, but enough to keep you healthy.

Stay hydrated - we had a hydration scare and trust us, it’s not pretty. Stay hydrated especially in hot and humid climates.
Hand sanitizer is your BFF - you don’t need to go crazy with hand sanitizer, but you’ll be grateful if you ever go to a bathroom that doesn’t have soap, running water, or both.
Don’t abuse your body - do the small things like wearing sunblock, or mosquito repellent if you are allergic, or maybe lotion if you are going to a super dry place. It’s the small things that add up to stress your body and make you more susceptible to getting sick.

Our trusties

These are the things we do, but we have no idea if they really work… but we feel they do.

Vitamin C - we take vitamin C a few days before traveling, during the flight and while we are in our destination. It’s a small thing to do every morning that we feel has really paid off.
Avoid raw(ish) food - we tend to avoid raw food if the place looks a little sketchy. That goes for all kinds of raw food; salads, meat, seafood, fruits. This doesn’t mean we never eat raw foods, we are just more careful of judging the place.
Take care of your gut - lately we’ve been kinder to our gut with probiotics, kombucha, fermented foods, etc… but when we started traveling we just took a gentle laxative to keep things flowing.

As always, there’s also a video you can find here: How to stay healthy while traveling. And checkout our ‘Travel essentials’ blog post for the stuff that you’ll never be sorry you have.

That’s all we got! If you have any tips of your own, please share them in the comments below.