worldtour

USA - Trypanosomiasis

I must say that preparing for health coverage and immunization for international travel is no picnic. It is literally a pain and it resulted in several days of painful research and a one-day bout of fever for both of us.. you might ask us how we got the fever.. well, read on…

We have an innocent-looking line written on our travel to-do list – it says “healthcare”. Well, as we have discovered since that simple line was written several weeks ago, healthcare is a nightmare and the devil is in the details (as you can see, I’m mixing metaphors liberally).

Given that we’re leaving our jobs, we need to find reasonable healthcare coverage – after searching on the net and looking at the several healthcare provider websites, I finally picked one of them and got us signed up. So far so good.

Nevertheless, it turns out that most healthcare plans do not cover normal health needs (such as prescription drugs or doctors visits) once you step outside the US. In fact, in some cases, coverage drops to ER visits only once you step outside the state of California. In fact, if you ask the agent on the phone, they’ll go to an extreme to describe exactly what types of emergency events are covered under their plans. Wonderful.

So our travel agent signed us up for international health coverage – this covers things like “emergency evacuation” which means (god forbid!) that if something happens anywhere abroad, we can get airlifted back to a US hospital (if local hospitals are not up to the mark) and the coverage plan pays for it. I'm really feeling good about this now...

So then I turned to the problem of getting immunized against the teaming hordes of diseases that roam the earth. I went to the website of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). One can pick from a list of different regions of the world… at that point, the goods news starts arriving in droves. Within the space of a few paragraphs, we see a profusion of wonderful terms, such as e. coli, cholera, parasites, typhoid, toxoplasmosis, hepatitis, malaria, diarrhea, vomiting, yellow fever, dengue, leishmaniasis, and onchocerciasis. If I actually believed I’d get all these diseases, I would never even step outside my home in the morning.

But two so-called diseases take the prize for scariness… one is called “filariasis” … fill-with-what-itis? The second one is trypanosomiasis (known to the average person as sleeping sickness) which has been reported in Darfur, Sudan. The good news is that we’re not planning to be anywhere near Darfur anytime soon…my palm pilot doesn’t have any anti-janjaweed software yet.

Being short of time, I picked what sounded like the more commonly-occuring diseases and both of us checked our immunization records to see if we were immunized. It turns out that we both had to get a few more immunization shots. I then called my healthcare provider and asked them where I could go to get these shots. The answer was a resounding “no.” No? What does that mean? It means that doctors & clinics get reimbursed only upto 80% of what they pay to procure the shots – so this means that these doctors are not receptive toward being asked to provide immunization shots. Anyway, so now I’m calling around trying to find some solution. Finally, UCSF referred us to the Overseas Medical Center in San Francisco.

So off we went to the Overseas Medical Center yesterday. After paying muchos dineros, we got our shots. The only interesting parts about that foray was that our doctor had climbed Kilimanjaro in ’75 and said it was a piece of cake. He was also in neighbouring Kenya when Kenya got its independence… in his terms – “I saw the Kenyan flag go up and the British flag come down..” He also informed us that our anti-malaria pills will perhaps cause us to have hallucinations and nightmares... if we're not having enough fun travelling, we'll definitely be having lots of fun with the hallucinations ;-)

Which brings us back to fever. As we had yellow fever immunization shots, we both got a slight fever yesterday. Not to worry. The fever was quickly dispatched with a couple of Tylenols.

That’s it for now. We promise to write more upbeat blogs in the future... :-)
-dev

Where are we going?

Here's the current list - the latter parts of the trip will change and become more realistic soon!

	September – Europe 30 days Russia - Moscow, St. Petersburg Czech Republic – Prague France - Paris, Collioure Spain - Barcelona, Madrid, Gibralta
	October to mid-November – Africa 35 days Morocco - Fez, Casablanca Egypt - Cairo, Luxor Jordan – Petra Tanzania/Kenya - Nairobi, Mt. Kilimanjaro, Serengeti South Africa - Johannesburg
	Mid-November to end-December – India 40 days Bombay/Pune Gujarat Delhi One more destination (thinking about Sikkim, MP or Madras)
	January (1st Half) – South East Asia 14 days Thailand – Bangkok Cambodia – Angkor Wat Singapore (maybe)
	January (2nd Half) – New Zealand 14 days Auckland North Island South Island
	February - South America 21 days Peru - Lima, Machu Pichu Brazil - Rio de Janeiro, Salvador de Baia, Amazon

 

Visas are a pain!

I'm having a hell of time trying to get tourist visas to all these countries. It seems like South Asian passport holders are the pariahs of the world. I have to get a visa for every single country in the world, other than, for some reason, Hong Kong and Singapore. So, for this trip, that means I need to get 15 visas. I could finance a vacation just on the money I spend on those visas! And Smruti as an American citizen needs just 5 visas (Russia, Brazil, Tanzania, Jordan, India).

For example, I had to get a hotel in Russia to fedex me a visa voucher and original reservation documents (whereas Russia allows most other countries to send in faxed documents). This required several phone conversations with the hotels in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The visa I get for Russia will only be for the 1 week that I am currently planning to be there. We can't stay there for even one day longer or (we are told) we will be deported to a gulag in Siberia. And we can't stay at any other hotel because the visa voucher states that we have to stay at that hotel.

The Schengen visa (for France, Spain etc.) had a similar issue. It's bizarre that, for the sake of getting a visa, we have to book hotels even though we don't know our exact dates or places we're going to stay.

The good news is that that the African countries seem to be far less bureaucratic!
-dev

World travellers galore

Now that we're telling people that we'll be travelling around the world, it seems that we have no dearth of friends who have travelled and/or lived around the world and have offered their advice as to what to do in each place.

We're very fortunate that friends and family around the world are helping us in so many ways on this trip. We've got family and friends in Paris, Collioure (France), Madrid, South Africa, India (of course!), Thailand, New Zealand, Moscow, Brazil etc. Quite amazing.

Some examples:

- We met a San Francisco couple who spent 14 months traveling around the world from 2002 to 2003. Their theme was wildlife - they picked all sorts of wildlife-related events around the world and then scheduled their trip around those events. So, for example, they went to see the big migration in Tanzania in January and the migration of whales in Australia is some other month. They saw five types of big cats in South America etc. etc.!

- A family friend of ours in New York state has spent the last couple of decades travelling around the world. We got some detailed feedback on Mt. Kilimanjaro and how to go about climbing it!

- We met another San Francisco couple who are going to be going to South America for several months, including going to Patagonia and Tierra Del Fuegos.

- A friend of ours (she knows who she is!) spent a couple of months in New Zealand and several months in Australia. We got detailed advice on where to go in New Zealand!

- A friend from work is from Russia and is giving us advice on what to say and where to go - for example, the Golden Circle around Moscow. I have my suspicions, though, that he is going to make us look foolish by teaching us so-called everyday phrases such as "hello" or "how much" that actually are curse words... :-)

- And many more such examples ...

In terms of learning about different places, I've also gone to sites like TravelPod which has fascinating blogs on world travel. And then, of course, we have our Lonely Planet guides, of which we have so many that we may require a separate backpack just to carry those!
-dev

Load lifters is the name of my next rock album

Smruti here. Of course, Dev, being Dev, didn't explain just how it was that we got our hands on our snazzy new Eagle Creek Ultimate Explorer Backpacks. We spent over two hours at REI trying on almost every single backpack. With wheels, with adjustable shoulder straps. adjustable waist bands. I have never felt so short-waisted as I did when I tried on some of the backpacks made for longer-torsoed folks. It was like looking into a fun house mirror.

We got really lucky with the guy helping us..he helped us pick 5 backpacks, then whittled it down to three. And then we tried on (and I mean, blucked, adjusted, strapped on) each backpack and paraded up and down the staircase with the backpacks filled with pillows and weights. I know it's probably what they do for everyone, but I felt special.

oh, and did I mention Dev basically grilled the first person we asked about the backpacks? Poor girl, she couldn't wait to get out of there and avoid the questions he was firing at her. She probably wondered why exactly she decided to come upstairs to backpack territory.-

Next up- trying to figure out what to pack!

Looking at my backpack

I'm looking at this bag... Eagle Creek.. Ultimate Explorer .. or something like that and feeling ill. Not only do I have to compress 6 months worth of stuff down into 20 pounds, but then I will have to carry those 20 pounds for 6 months.. Well, at least I'll lose weight pretty dramatically :-)
-dev