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Responses

• Added by: Kavey
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• Hmmm... I got a pretty bad variant of delhi belly in India a couple of years back. Unusually I was travelling without husband or family. Even my robust medical kit including cipro was making no difference. I was staying in a lovely home with some friends I felt comfortable with but hadn't known that long. They knew I was poorly but not quite how severe it was. During one night I took a turn for the worse. In desperation I called my parents in the middle of the night (both retired doctors), described the symptoms, told them what meds I'd been trying and for how long.
  
  At which point my dad phoned one of his closest friends who just happens to own/ run a Delhi hospital. The friend sent an "ambulance" for me. When I saw that my heart sank slightly as it was a rust bucket with a bench in the back, a single oxygen tank, no straps to help keep patient from being knocked about in transit.
  
  Still, I was given a private room and it was good to see that, although the hospital was not one of the wealthy, shiny, modern places India now boasts it was scrupulously cleaned (in the way NHS hospitals used to be once upon a time).
  
  Not speaking Hindi I found the efficient nurse and doctor chatter less reassuring than I ought to have and burst into tears.
  
  Another call to my mum and she called her younger sister, who lives about 40 minutes outside of Delhi, to come in and stay with me. Once she arrived I immediately felt calmer and it only took one day/ night for the medicine, delivered via a drip, to take care of my problem.
  
  Next day they agreed, slightly reluctantly, to check me out and was able to join the start of a tour I'd booked and long been looking forward to!
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• Added by: Kavey
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• Oh and a bomb went off RIGHT outside the restaurant we were eating in when we were in Istanbul. Several of the windows broke but we weren't hurt. One man right by the bomb had a leg injury but there were no fatalities. Scary though.
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• Added by: Simp246
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• Last year my husband and I took a 6 month honeymoon which was amazing but basically just turned into a comedy of calamities for us and our travel companions...
  
  
  
  - Overlanding through the outback in Oz our truck driver broke his tooth, got stung by a scorpion and then fell off the top of the 15ft truck...immediately went into shock and ultimately breaking his wrist, and badly bruising his back and ankles....4 hours drive from the nearest civilisation...
  
  
  
  - In Laos we got to the airport only to realise that our tour leader had failed to organise our Vietnam visas...got sent back to our hotel to wait out the weekend and proceeded to be battered by a tropical storm only narrowing surviving when the ceiling of our hotel room collapsed...
  
  
  
  - In Africa I got severe dehydration and spent 2 weeks on the brink of being rushed to hospital...whilst being bumped around another truck...a friend of ours also got mauled by a 'tame' cheetah...thankfully he was fine...
  
  
  
  - We got home safely, or so we thought, when I tripped and fell down the stairs at home breaking my ankle...ouch!
  
  
  
  You expect drama when you go away, but I think we saw perhaps more than our fair share...doesn't put me off from doing it again though!
  
  
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• Added by: Kwan
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• This spring in Bangkok with a chum. Pleasant evening drinking, the bars had just closed but I suggested a last one at the street carts on Sukhumvit Road, something I'd done many times before. As we sat down 2 girls joined us. We certainly had no intention of nothing more than talking to them. A woman brought us a bottle of Chang apiece, a brief (?) chat . .
  
  We woke up in our respective rooms 12 hours later, feeling awful, I stood up and right away crashed to the floor banging my head. I passed out again. About one hour later I came round again. My bag had been slit open, debit card pinched along with about £30. Similar story with my chum. Drugged and Mugged in The Big Mango . . and a lesson learnt. And don't even get me started about being on the beach after an early morning swim on Koh Lanta - Boxing Day 2004 and seeing a huge wave heading towards me...! Apart from that Thailand is marvellous.
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• Added by: calamine2808
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• Peru was pretty eventful. I was told I couldn’t join the group to trek the Inca Trail due to passing out twice with altitude sickness. I was gutted, but decided to catch the train up to Machu Picchu instead. Half an hour out of Cucso station I began feeling the effects of a very nasty upset tummy due to swallowing a belly full of river water when rafting the Urubamba the day before. The 4 hour journey was agony and by the time we reached the ruins I was in tears. I spent the whole day scaring tourists with my pasty complexion and crawling down onto the terraces to be sick. Sacrilege!
  
  Back in Lima we were woken at 5am by an earthquake which measured 6.4 on the Richter scale. We were on the 16th floor and could hear the windows breaking in the floors below. Frightening but strangely exhilarating…
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• Added by: loveline
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• Well we spent six weeks in Asia last year - about a week in, we were at Tagaytay in the Philippines being taken on what I imagine is an amazing boat ride across Taal Lake which is an old Volcano. My wife wife enjoying herself and I was feeling dodgy, hot, cold, sick etc back on land I just asked if we could go straight to the hotel as i felt unwell.
  
  Back at the room, I spent the next two days with a really high temperature literally sleeping cuddled up to a bag of Ice, the most powerful vomiting and diarrhea I have ever experienced. My wife was so concerned that even though I was shivering and trying to cover myself up, she would not let me have a cover and made me have cold showers literally every hour as I was actually running hot enough to boil a kettle on!
  
  After two days we were scheduled to fly to Hong Kong, bravely I carried on only to spend three days in the hotel room missing Hong Kong almost completely and the same in Shenzhen.
  
  Finally almost two weeks later I was better and got to enjoy Macau!
  
  
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• Added by: Huck
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• This travel experience taught me to better appreciate my fellow man/woman so I hope it gives you food for thought
  
  
  
  In 1981 when on one of my regular business trips to India I was involved in a car accident in Delhi in the early hours of the morning that resulted in me having a broken shoulder. After receiving medical treatment at the All India Instituite of Medical Research (the Hammersmith Hospital of Delhi) that resulted in my arm being strapped up, I was advised to get the first flight back to England for further treatment. However as I could not get a return flight for 24 hours I decided to visit our distributor.
  
  
  
  So there I was in the middle of the morning with my arm in a sling and carrying a brief case walking across Connaught Square, the main and very busy square in New Delhi. I was then stopped five times by local Indians - two from the lower classes, one from the middle class and two from the upper class. They all asked me the same question about why I was walking like that by myself. When I said I had been involved in a car accident and was going to see my distributor, they all said I should not be doing that by myself. Then the two from the lower classes said they would prefer it if their friends who owned a motor tricycle looked after me as a guest. The man from the middle class said the same but referred me to his friend who owned a taxi cab and the two from the upper class offered to put their cars and chauffeurs at my disposal until I boarded the plane home.
  
  
  
  My question to all reading this story is, “if you were walking through your local town centre and saw an obvious visitor from another race, with their arm in a sling and carrying a brief case walking towards you, what would you do?” - - - HMMMMMMMM
  
  
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• Added by: RobertHale
• On: 11 Jul 2008
• In all my travelling, I have only once needed to make use of the local medical facilities and that was my own fault. It happened when I went on a hiking trip in Thailand and Laos. The first day of hiking was gentle and easy, no more than a pleasant ambling stroll. We waded through shallow cooling rivers. We climbed gentle grassy ascents. We walked along dusty but well maintained tracks that wound through the trees. And, after no more than a couple of hours, we reached the Karen village that was to be our stopping place for the night.
  
  Our accommodation was in one of the typical local huts, built on stilts with the animals asleep underneath. We were sleeping on the floor and my locally hired sleeping bag was tissue paper thin and would have been inadequate to even the mildest of chills. As the night was freezing it was worse than useless
  
  When dawn came I pulled on my shoes and approached the steps that led down. What happened next is a little vague. I looked down at the steps and noted their position and stepped down. At the crucial moment something must have distracted me for the next thing I knew I had missed the step and was pitching forward with my arms instinctively flailing up towards my head for protection. It did no good and even as I heard myself yelling, I felt my head hammer solidly against one of the pillars supporting the next building.
  
  We checked my injuries – there were several small shallow cuts and grazes above my left ear and on the back of my head and two rather deep gashes - one immediately behind the ear and a second on the front of it which had torn down a triangular flap of skin which was hanging loose. An hour later and we were at the hospital. They x-rayed my foot, which had also been hurt, and said it was not broken but too badly bruised to walk. They stitched up my ear. They gave me prescriptions for sterile dressings and swabs, iodine solution, sterile saline solution and assorted drugs.
  
  The stitches were removed at a hospital in Laos. That was a less pleasant experience than the fall had been. From a distance it didn't look too bad but the closer Igot the worse I felt. Inside bleeding people lay on wooden trolleys in corridors that were open to the dusty outside. The walls looked as if they had last been painted decades ago. I was led to a room where there was a doctors table that could have come from the last century. On the wall was a mural – it showed a pale and deathly looking patient in a bed with snakes, spiders, flies, rats and cockroaches crawling on the sheets. Nevertheless the stitches were soon removed, the wound pronounced infection free and I was on my way, thankful to have escaped so lightly from my mishap.
  
  And that, I can say with relief, was my single encounter with overseas hospitals. And the cost to my insurance? Nil. All that medical treatment had totalled almost £4, not even close to the excess on the policy.
  
  
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• Added by: Huck
• On: 12 Jul 2008
• Another experience when travelling in India
  
  
  
  This also occurred in 1981 on what was supposed to be my last business visit to this lovely country when I was accompanied by a colleague who would be taking over from me. So I asked our distributor to arrange for me to visit the Haffkine Institute in Bombay (which I always visited on my visits to discuss with them methods of improving their quantities of various vaccines et al) on either a Tuesday or Thursday to see their public demonstration of them extracting the venom from cobras. I was therefore a little disturbed to find my visit was scheduled for a Wednesday and when I questioned this I was advised that as I had been so helpful to them with enhancing their vaccine production they would be giving me a private demonstration. Good I thought and that would also be a lesson to my colleague in being helpful to our customers. As I said – so I thought!!
  
  
  
  Well the Wednesday dawned and we presented ourselves at the Institute at the appointed time. We were duly introduced to the chief of the venom snake house who unfortunately had a deformed right hand. In we went to the snake house and were shown to a cross roads in the pathways between the snake housings. I was lucky to be able to lean against the bench for a good view but my colleague had to stand in the pathway with nowhere to prop himself up. Then the chief brought in front of me a tallish (about 4 foot) Ali Baba straw basket. Hen then removed the lid - - - WOW the largest cobra I had ever seen and don’t want to see again, rose up and twisted to fix his/her eye on me about 18 inches away. By now I was fixed tight against the bench and couldn’t move - BUT my colleague had moved swiftly from his free position in the pathway out of the door the other end!!
  
  
  
  While all this was registering in my mind, the chief moved his right arm swiftly to grab the cobra round the jaw from the rear and leaving in the basket the rest of its many feet in length. Then I realised that the deformity of his right hand was just simply muscle as he fought to keep open the cobra’s mouth while with his left hand he brought round a beaker with a tissue covering. Meanwhile the cobra tried to twist its head to either bite him or me whichever he could reach!! Fortunately the chief won the battle and forced the cobra to pierce the tissue covering the top of the beaker with its mighty great fangs – of which I had a brilliant and frightening view – following which the venom spurted out like thick cream into the base of the beaker.
  
  
  
  The chief carefully gave me the beaker to hold and threw the cobra back into the basket at which time the cobra was rising swiftly again – but I am pleased to say the chief won and he placed the lid firmly on the basket. I was then advised that this cobra was their largest animal they had especially isolated for me so he/she would perform well for my demonstration. Yes it performed well and I am pleased to say I did not need a rapid change of pants as it had all happened too quickly for me to physically react!!
  
  
  
  My next job was to find where my colleague had disappeared to!!!!
  
  
  
  Such is the joy of travelling the world on business
  
  
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• Added by: Angela R
• On: 13 Jul 2008
• ur problems mostly have been before travelling, so far. My husband underwent spinal surgery in '97 for ruptured discs and this has left him with ongoing back problems which get worse in the colder weather which is why we like to go away in the winter. We had booked a major, and expensive, tour to China with Cox & Kings as his 50th birthday present. We were doing the lot, Ynagtze bruise, Terracotta Warriers, Beijing etc. Three weeks before departure he was drying his foot on the side of the bath when it slipped and this simple thing put his discs out again. He was flat and could barely walk to the bathroom which is next door to the bedroom! Fortunately I work for an Orthopaedic Surgeon who advised us that no way could we attempt such a strenuous trip and advised us to cancel. We were devastated, obviously, but although I thought we wouldn't get our money back as the insurers would say this was a pre-existing problem they surprised me and paid up without a query, although they would not cover my husband's back problem in future. This meant that I had to shop around and find a company that would, which was difficult but we have the cover now at a vastly inflated premium.
  
  
  
  We then booked to go to Jordan later that year instead of China. A week before we went he told me he felt ill and stayed in bed for for entire week telling me he had a virus! It was not until we had driven to the airport that I realised he was moving in a very careful manner and that he had done it again and had kept quiet about it all week! Fortunately, we had a fantastic driver in Jordan who looked after him and made sure he was OK. However, room service always find it strange that I ring for ice at about 7 a.m. until I explain that it for an icepack.
  
  
  
  The following winter we were due to go to Egypt with our friends on a Lake Nasser cruise and a week in Aswan. Three days before we went I nagged him to put out the rubbish, when he came back in that simple act had done his back again! We still went, I upgraded him to Club for the flight out while the rest of us travelled economy! Once we were on the boat the staff could not do enough for him and were very kind.
  
  
  
  Not finished yet, the following winter we went to Thailand. Got there fine, but in the mountains it was quite cold in the morning and while doing his exercises he managed to tweak his back again! Again, our wonderful driver and guide looked after him and made sure he was OK as did the staff at the Tubkaak Hotel in Krabi once we got there.
  
  
  
  It has become a bit of a joke and people do suggest I don't tell him when we are going on holiday. This is the reason why we always book an independent tour so that we can always go at our own speed and he can always sit in the front seat and see any bumps in the road before we get to them and he doesn't get jarred. Trouble is this means we won't ever be able to do a safari or got to Namibia which is what I would love to do. I seem to spend my time going round the world explaining about my husband's back problems!!!
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• Added by: Lady Bear
• On: 14 Jul 2008
• A few experiences - ended up in hospital in Atlanta with suspected meningitis. Had a spinal tap which went wrong and kept leaking spinal fluid and I ended up in a wheelchair unable to stand and in a great deal of pain for a few weeks. Then 3 months later I was so busy watching Victoria Falls that I fell into a ditch and badly sprained my ankle - resulting in another wheelchair bound flight and injections of anti-coagulants into the stomach (ouch) in Jo'burg before they would let me on a long haul flight. Worst one - I got rushed into hospital in the Borneo rain forest with suspected appendicitis. They found out it was salmonella - but in the tests discovered i had a big tumor the size of a pineapple which required an operation as soon as I got home. Put a bit of a dampener on the rest of the trip! But the hospital was for oil workers and it was very clean and modern. The staff were all Chinese and the nurses had never seen a white woman - let alone one with blond hair, blue eyes and 5 foot 10 so they all came and stared at me.
  
  
  
  I got a private room with an extra bed for my husband and great treatment. Much better than my emergency experiences with the NHS!
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• Added by: Rhoda1
• On: 14 Jul 2008
• We've had a few horror stories as well. Daughter Esther (aged 4) contracted meningitis in Bermuda and was in hospital for a week. Fortunately she made a full recovery.
  
  Another year, daughter Ruth (aged 14) broke her leg 3 days before we were due to fly to Bermuda for the summer holidays - and was devastated that she wouldn't be able to snorkel for the entire 6 weeks. Her dad came to the rescue and made a neoprene full leg 'boot' to cover the cast and keep it dry.
  
  As for us - I tweaked my back just before we were due to fly to Turkey for the solar eclipse, so that cancelled out that trip. Six months of osteopaths, physio, a lumbar injection and being 'stretched' on a rack didn't improve matters, so that cancelled out our first attempt at going to the Pushkar Camel Fair. I then had an operation which improved matters considerably, but has still left me with a trapped nerve and constant pain in my foot. Still, things could be worse.
  
  We had to cancel another holiday when Tony was rushed in to hospital with ulcerative colitis and they thought they would have to remove part of his colon. He managed to keep it - probably will power!
  
  And most spectacularly of all, I rolled the car on the M25 on the way to Dover for a trip to France. (A Croation artic pulled out in front of me and clipped the side of the car.) Tony had scrapes and grazes. I got out without a scratch! Having 'rescued' the car to the car graveyard, the RAC told us to take a taxi to Maidstone and hire a car to take us back home! So there we were - both of us with neck braces, Tony looking like he'd been in a war with a head bandage and torn clothing - and the car hire people didn't bat an eyelid. Mind you, I've never driven so slowly back round the M25.
  
  And they say go on holiday for a break and relaxation!
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• Added by: JackyM
• On: 14 Jul 2008
• I am a big believer in trying new and exciting experiences when travelling and love an adrenaline rush - White Water Rafting in Uganda, Skydiving in Namibia, Bungee Jumping at Victoria Falls, Paragliding in Turkey, Hang-gliding in Rio to name a few.
  
  Whilst in New Zealand I decided to try new experiences so went skiing for the first time and surprisingly didnt fall over at all! Then in Queenstown I decided that I loved Paragliding so much I would go again, at dusk, to watch the sun set from the sky. It was a mild winter so there wasnt as much snow as usual and the ground was quite exposed. We took off from the back of the ski slope, but as we did the wind dropped and we decended - at speed - and I had already lifted my legs.
  
  The result was crashing onto my knees on rocks with the full weight of my instructor behind me - the single most painful experience of my life!! It happened so quick I didnt have time to think I was going to continue crashing down the mountain and thankfully we took back off again, but I was in so much pain we had to do an emergency landing at the bottom of the ski slope.
  
  Amazingly I didnt break anything or do any permanent damage - just badly bruise and couldnt bend my legs very well for about a week.
  
  As you can imagine the next day I took it easy and rested my poor knees.....Actually no, I went Canyon Swinging, but only the once - well I wouldnt want to push my luck!!
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• Added by: thehiker
• On: 17 Jul 2008
• Beijing 1993. Due to the pollution my throat became extremely inflamed and nothing could soothe it. Our rep, troubled by my predicament, fetched a pink powder from a 'local' chemist. He told me to breathe it in covering my red and raw throat. It worked! Instantly I recovered enough to eat and drink again. But my euphoria was short lived. Reading the ingredients I suddenly felt rather queer; ginseng, roots, herbs and … snake semen! Needless to say, I have never been able to look a snake in the face again. How do they get it?
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• Added by: becks
• On: 17 Jul 2008
• In mexico we got food poisoning and spent 3 days in bed with a bucket between us and hostel staff offering us all manner of cures.
  
  
  
  However the worst happened in jamaica in may of this year.
  
  the roads out there are appalling as are the drivers so we had a few close escapes but the day before we flew out we were in a pretty bad crash.
  
  we had no seat belts on and our car rolled 3 times. a 20 year old jamaican died despite our efforts to help him at the scene. we were taken to hospital then the police station and thanks to the hospitality of the policewoman who was first on the scene we stayed with her then did witness statements with her in the morning rather than go back to the station which would have caused us to miss our flight to the uk.
  
  we know its in court in next week and have been told we may still have to go back as witnesses.
  
  i'm still having treatment but it just shows you should make the most of every minute as you really don't know when it will your last.
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• Added by: becks
• On: 17 Jul 2008
• just read hucks post and thouht i would add that people do seem so generous and caring towards foreigners in other countries. while we were in hospital post jamaica crash we were offered a room by a couple of jamaicans saying they didn't have much but we were welcome to stay rather than going to an impersonal hotel with no-one to look after us.
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• Added by: becks
• On: 17 Jul 2008
• In mexico we got food poisoning and spent 3 days in bed with a bucket between us and hostel staff offering us all manner of cures.
  
  
  
  However the worst happened in jamaica in may of this year.
  
  the roads out there are appalling as are the drivers so we had a few close escapes but the day before we flew out we were in a pretty bad crash.
  
  we had no seat belts on and our car rolled 3 times. a 20 year old jamaican died despite our efforts to help him at the scene. we were taken to hospital then the police station and thanks to the hospitality of the policewoman who was first on the scene we stayed with her then did witness statements with her in the morning rather than go back to the station which would have caused us to miss our flight to the uk.
  
  we know its in court in next week and have been told we may still have to go back as witnesses.
  
  i'm still having treatment but it just shows you should make the most of every minute as you really don't know when it will your last.
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• Added by: Kathryn
• On: 18 Jul 2008
• Luckily not much has happened to me except dodgy tummies and a 3 day migraine in Zanzibar (we were only there for 3 days - must go back one day...) but other people...my mother broke her hip and had to cancel a safari booking (& still hasn't made it on one yet), my sister had a really bad ear infection and couldn't fly to Japan so had to stay in Sri Lanka (not a particular hardship but disappointing re Japan obviously) and various friends and relations have had skiing accidents requiring helicopters and hospitals. Oh and we had to cancel a skiing holiday because my husband broke his neck but at the time that was the least of our worries (he's fine now though). Someone else I know got run over by a South American drug dealer's boat and had to leave the country pretty sharpish.
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• Added by: Ruth
• On: 19 Jul 2008
• I was shopping in a local indoor market in Cambodia with my mam only to hear a gun shot outside..we started walking away from where the gun shot came from only for more to be fired..we then dove behind a market stall as a man with a rather large gun pointing at us charged forward. Luckily it turned out to be a drunk local who shot at a policeman who rataliated & then arrested him.
  
  
  
  I have also tuned up at the airport a day early after a 5 week trip which passed without incdent for us. It was in 2004, when I went to Russia. We found out later that when we were there 2 planes were blown out of the sky, the checyns took that school hostage & people died in bomb attacks outside metro stations we had been to the previous day. We didn't know anything for weeks though luckily.
  
  
  
  we met people who had been held up at gun point in rio by a taxi driver but we didn't see even a hint of trouble.
  
  
  
  I ended up at a hospital in florida with what a medic at the park suspected was venomous spder bites. Turned out it was only moosquito bites.
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• Added by: louiseypeasy
• On: 02 Aug 2008
• Fracturing my ankle in Mexico is mine.
  
  Having never broken a bone before I didn't realise what was wrong and continued on my travels (even climbed a pyramid!). When I got to Guatamala and cried if I tripped up I decided to go to the hospital but there was no-one there who could read my x-ray and I had to to go to a private clinic where they put the cast on too tight. 3 days later I was in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and in excruciating pain when the waitress in the only restaurant asked me what was wrong. I told her in my fortunately OK Spanish and she got her friend, a dutch doctor, to come. For 3 hours I lay on a restaurant table while they cut at the cast with a butter knife and a razor before they moved me to the hospital simply to stop me getting distressed by the fact that the whole town was watching. After another 2 hours they cost the cast off to reveal that my big toe was bright red and green and 3 times its normal size. Had I been in the cast for another 12 hours I'd have lost my toe and I still have a scar 5.5 years later.
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