On staying healthy and staying wired

A few tips to avoid illness

Staying healthy in India takes preparation, but it also can require some on-the-spot decision making.

I consulted the travel nurses at Group Health before I left, updated my tetanus shot, filled prescriptions for malaria and diarrhea and am following their advice to take two tablets of Pepto Bismol twice a day, an hour before meals.

In more than 25 years of traveling, I've followed their advice and have become ill only once, briefly, two years ago in Laos.

In India, where it's hot and the power can go off and on throughout the day, I'm not eating meat or chicken — not hard when there's so much good vegetarian food available.

Hand-washing often is essential, and when that's not possible (the bathrooms on trains have no soap, for instance), I have a little bottle of hand sanitizer I carry with me.

Currently there's a dengue fever outbreak in Northern India, including Delhi. Chikungunya, another virus carried by mosquitoes, is affecting Kerala in the south.

Tourism officials are leaning on Indian authorities not to declare either an epidemic. This is the start of the high season for travel in India, and already there have been cancellations in Kerala where I'm going later this week.

I have plans to go overnight through the backwaters on a converted rice barge. I'll assess things closer to the time and play it by ear for now.

In the meantime, I'm keeping on top of the situation by following the news and talking to other travelers.

It's important to stay flexible and be prepared to rearrange plans when traveling in India.

One British couple I talked with reversed the order of their trip to arrive in Kerala later rather than sooner, on the theory that spraying would begin and the virus would subside with time.

Sometimes initial reports are overblown in a country such as India, where disease and sickness are common.

An estimated 40,000 cases of illness in Kerala at first blamed on chikungunya were later reduced to 33, based on tests by the World Health Organization.

How I stay in touch

Some people have asked if I travel with a laptop. I don't. I usually rely on Internet cafes to file these reports, but this time I'm using a wireless Palm Pilot with a fold-up keyboard.

If I can find wi-fi, as I did in my guesthouse in Delhi, I can send stories and e-mails directly from the Palm. Before I left, I bought a new software program that includes a word processor and a spell checker.

I can also insert the chip from my digital camera and send photos.

When wi-fi's not available, it gets a bit more complicated. I have to copy the files from the Palm onto an SD memory chip and transfer it to a PC using a connection.

Many of the PCs here are on dial-up, which makes for slow going. Sending just one photo this way takes about 10 minutes.