The Making of an Excellent African Adventure – Part 6

It hasn’t escaped me that it’s been 4 months since my last blog post. Without getting into too many excuses, there always seemed to be something else that had to be done and lately the blog has been taking a back seat. Nonetheless, there have been a few things that need to be reported so I’ve made a point of getting some keyboard time to post a few articles.

Since we had done pretty much all of the bookings for the Africa trip a few months ago, there wasn’t much new to report. At least until this week. We passed one of the big milestones on Tuesday when we went to the travel clinic and got the battery of inoculations that we knew we were going to get. All in all, we had 4 separate injections and two more prescriptions in pill format that we will take when we are in certain “high-risk” areas of Africa. High-risk, of course, always refers to areas where malaria is commonplace.

We’ve been told by anyone who has gone to the parts of the world where malaria is present and has gone to a travel doctor in advance of their trip that there there are two types of malaria medicine: the expensive and the cheap type. As it turned out, the difference in cost for the expensive malaria medicine was about $45 per person. Not really much when we factored in how much the entire Africa trip was costing us so we threw caution into the wind and went for the good stuff.

We also were given a prescription for some heavy-duty antibiotics to carry with us just in case. We were given instructions that if we were to come into contact with any kind of blood or infected instruments we were to have these pills on hand to deal with that kind of issue. While the travel clinic doctor was explaining this to me I was imagining Barb or I have to get some kind of life-saving surgery in some African village where sterilization meant wiping a rusty knife on a t-shirt. Had we not already put a sizable down payment on our trip now was the time to reconsider this whole thing.

So we ended up leaving the clinic with two injections in both arms and a fist full of prescriptions. The worst part of all of it is that I hardly remember all of the detailed instructions that the doctor gave us to take our life-saving pills. There were a bunch of brochures included with everything and hopefully it was all explained in them. Considering the king’s ransom that the whole travel clinic visit ended up costing us the last thing either of us want is to forget when to take the medicine that we’ll be bringing with us.

Baden