The first person to utter “shit happens” must have been a traveler.
As I emptied myself from both ends for the better part of 36 hours in the hills of northern Ecuador recently (a bad batch of cevichochos, I suspect), I was reminded that we owe our readers an accounting of how we usually manage to stay healthy while we travel.
Fortunately, Audrey and I have each only endured stomach bugs three or four times in the last few years of travel — in places like Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Guatemala, and most recently for me, Ecuador.
“You ate on the streets in Burma and never got sick? All that food in China and never sick? India even?”
Yes. That’s correct.
If you follow us, you know that we rarely deny ourselves the joys of exploring local street food and meals in hole-in-the-wall restaurants. And although it appears that we eat with reckless abandon, we do tend to follow some basic guidelines. These are not hard and fast rules (we do break them sometimes) but a philosophy and approach that seem to work for us. The idea is to sharpen our ability to size up eating situations while balancing the reward of authentic local dining with the risks of becoming ill.
via Ten Tips for Eating Local and Staying Healthy While Traveling Around the World.
A good read with advice good for the road and at home.
