Travel Tips (Part 9-tips from Stacey Part B)
(Continued)
Here are some more of Stacey’s Travel Tips, all written by her:
“Email to yourself anything you might need including airline and hotel reservation numbers and contact information, emergency numbers, email and snail mail addresses, travel websites, and scans of your passports and traveler’s checque numbers in case you somehow lose everything you were carrying.
I’ve traveled “heavy” and now that I’ve experienced travel with only a carry-on, I can’t imagine what anyone would want to take that would be worth lugging around more. Here are 2 helpful websites about packing light, not specific to Latin America:
http://www.ricksteves.com/plan/tips/packlight.htm
My own(Stacey’s) Central Am. packing list is #14 here:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=828622&tstart=0
Also, here is the preamble to the 2003 travelogue of our family’s trip to Belize, more philosophical.
~As Mason Williams would say, “Don’t go down to the ocean with a notion of what you will find”. In other words, expect your adventures to be wonderful but don’t expect them to be predictable;
~grab every opportunity to get to know the people as opposed to just seeing places and scenery. Hanging out in small villages and seeking out locals gave us many of our most special memories;
~take advantage of things that are every day experiences for locals, like beans and rice, bus rides and bike rides, and shopping for produce;
~remember the Peace Corp adage: “It’s not right or wrong, it’s just different”;
~stay as long as you can and adventure out from bases; we typically had 3-7 days in each location, and were glad for it;
~when traveling as a family, listen to the kids, plan to enjoy your together times and to spend times exploring on your own, as safety allows; our individual strengths and interests were woven together to make the trip more memorable for all of us;
~see a lot, but allow time to lay around in hammocks or sit and drink a coke with locals;
~read before and during your trip: guide books, identification books, the Belize Forum, and books set in Belize and written by Belizean authors, both fiction and non-fiction;
~pack a comprehensive medical kit that includes an antibiotic like cipro and a good quality water filter;
~take school supplies or books to donate along the way and gifts for kids and hosts (we took little rubber frog finger puppets and photo magnets showing a view of the wildflowers, mountains and Columbia River Gorge from our house);
~for bugs we preferred Sawyer’s Time Release Deet bug repellent, which worked wonderfully and allows less deet to be absorbed into your skin than most formulas. We took hefty doses of B vitamins and garlic pills starting weeks before we left in an effort to smell repugnant to those smallest of pests, and found that it worked perfectly in areas where there really weren’t any mosquitoes, but failed miserably where there were (hence, the Sawyer’s).
~other things we were glad we had: headlamps, plant and animal identification cards, copies of our lodging reservation and payment emails, sun hats, sunblock and aloe, sarongs (for the females) and bandanas, blank journals, a variety of cameras (including underwater ones) and lots of film, good quality waterproof binoculars, clothes line and pins, cable ties, our own fishing equipment, including a great collection of hand-tied flies, open minds, a desire for adventure, and our senses of humor.
Thanks to Stacey for those.
Stay tuned for “Part C” of Stacey’s travel tips–
Steve Barrymore ssb11@prodigy.net
To read about my other travels click here or http://blog.newsok.com/thewanderer/mytravels/
Comments? Please post below or email me at ssb11@prodigy.net
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
very good tips, very helpfull. I am a traveler and i can see how you can benefit if following these short of suggestions