- You need to be physically and mentally fit for travel — Match your physical and mental readiness with the destinations, climate and experiences in your trip plan. If you’re out of shape, can you get ready in time?
- Consider a less demanding trip — If you’re not in great physical shape, consider trips with less physical exertion, requirement for stamina or exposure to the elements.
- Get check-ups prior to travel — It’s wise to get physical check-ups prior to departure, especially if you’re 60+ or have a physical condition that could be aggravated by travel.
- Ensure you have correct vaccinations — Know what you need. Update any “childhood” vaccinations that require it. Get any that are recommended for your destinations.
Are you physically and mentally fit for travel? If you have a traveling companion, is he or she ready too?
- Physical readiness — Maybe your image of travel is lounging on a beach chair with a cool drink in your hand, but most independent travel is more physical than that. It typically involves lots of walking, sometimes carrying or pulling your luggage. And many activities can be much more physically challenging than a stroll through the Louvre. Make sure that you’re ready for your travel plans.
- Mental readiness — One of the main reasons we travel is for the mental fresh air. But travel can also pose challenges — your environment is strange, you might get lonely at times, you’re making decisions every day, your body can get tired or ill and incidents can occur that cause your stress to spike. If you’re vulnerable to stress, the simplest remedy is (surprise!) not to get into stressful situations in the first place. Go to rich countries and be sure to have a sufficient budget. If you’re more mentally robust, feel free to ramble around poor countries on the cheap.
To check on the personal attitudes that can power an enjoyable trip, please read Can you DIY?
Overall fitness for travel is a combination of physical and mental condition. Mental toughness can extend your physical limits, while mental fragility can contract them.
How to Travel is not a medical authority. We offer the following information as guidelines only. If you have any doubts about your condition and the demands travel will place on you, please consult a physician who is familiar with your medical history. Be sure to inform your doctor of where you plan to go and what taxing activities you plan to do.
Physical readiness
Are you physically fit for travel? Is your conditioning good enough for the activities you plan? If not, what can you do about it?
Everyday activities
- Walking — Just sightseeing, you could walk 10 km. (6 mi.) per day, perhaps much more.
- Climbing — The geography of your destination might be nothing but hills. Your room-with-a-view might be on the third floor of a delightful inn that has no elevator (lift).
- Moving your luggage — Unless you’re a luxury traveler with someone to handle your bags for you, you will find yourself carrying or pulling your bags through airports and stations, lifting them into overhead bins and luggage racks, hauling them up and down stairs in metros (subways) or hotels and more.
- Standing — You could be standing for long periods aboard a bus or in a queue, sometimes in a crowd and sometimes in heat or cold.
- Enduring — Days can be long and exhausting, even if no single activity requires much exertion. Climatic conditions can make it much worse.
Centerpiece experiences
These are the big things you do at your destination, your reason for going there. The range of physical demands is huge.
You can spend a week lounging in a beach chair on Zanzibar and barely twitch a muscle. Or you can cross to the mainland to spend a week climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
- Estimate your maximum physical requirement — Can you really summon the energy and stamina to climb Kilimanjaro’s 5895 m (19,341 ft)? Have you done anything comparable in recent years that could serve as a benchmark for your physical capacity? If you’ve already gone up 6000 m, then you know you can summit Kili… unless that last ascent was 20 years ago. Maybe you’ve been up to 5000m, but don’t assume that the last 1000 m is more of the same. It’s not.
- Focus and conserve your energy — If you’re planning on something physically daunting, does your itinerary allow you to get a bit of rest immediately prior? More importantly, is there also time to recover afterwards? Maybe you should climb Kilimanjaro first, then spend some days collapsed on that beach chair in Zanzibar.
- What if your traveling companion isn’t up to the challenge? — Perhaps you feel you’re ready for a physically demanding experience. But what if your traveling companion is not? Is it possible for both of you to do part of the experience? Do you cancel the experience? Or can you spend some time apart, doing separate things? You climb Kili and leave your companion to relax in the garden of the Marangu Hotel at the foot of the mountain.
Factors that influence physical stress
- Weather — Depending on destination and season, the weather can be so hot or so cold that you can barely move outside. Humidity, precipitation and wind make it worse. Choose your destination and season appropriately, or at least know what to expect and prepare yourself.
- Travel style — Budget travel is usually fine, but can sometimes challenge your body (such as a long ride in a hot, packed bus) and then fail to provide quality rest at the end of the day (such as a dank room in a noisy flea-bag hotel). Paying for a higher style of travel doesn’t challenge your body so much in the first place. A slower pace allows for adequate rest.
- Trip duration — For a short trip, you can probably ignore the physical demands of everyday activities, especially if you’re young and healthy. (You’ll still have to be ready for any extreme experiences.) If your trip is longer and you’re repeatedly moving from place to place, accumulating physical demands can wear you down. It’s worse if you don’t give yourself enough time to recuperate en route, so build “rest stops” into your itinerary.
- Medical conditions — Traveling with a medical condition complicates your preparation. Depending upon what your condition is, some destinations and activities will be possible, others maybe not. Can you maintain whatever treatment is required while traveling? Your provider of travel health insurance may exclude your pre-condition or charge extra for a rider to add coverage.
What to do if you’re not physically ready
When you have some idea of what the physical challenges will be, you need to be honest about your own condition and ability to meet those challenges. If you conclude that you’re not fit for travel or not ready for some of your planned experiences, consider making some adjustments to reduce the wear and tear on your body. If you don’t, you could injure yourself.
- Change your planned centerpiece experiences — Be realistic. If you seriously doubt your physical ability to do an experience, don’t set yourself up for failure. At least find a lesser challenge and see how it goes. Then, time and money permitting, you’ll be better able to judge your readiness for a bigger challenge.
- Listen to your body — There’s a tendency, especially among younger travelers to charge around at full speed, regardless of wear-and-tear. Exhaustion, dehydration, over-exposure to sun, muscle or joint pain, insomnia — there are lots of symptoms telling you to slow down, find a place to recover and be patient while your body recovers.
- Get in shape — If you’re out of shape and have ample time before that challenging experience, you can put yourself on a conditioning program.
- Slow down — If you’re not physically able to climb Kilimanjaro in 5 days, embrace ancient Swahili wisdom and go polé polé (slowly, slowly). Give yourself 7 or 8 days to summit and come back down.
- Upgrade your travel style — Instead of going the hard way, maybe you could upgrade your transport and cover distance by air instead of train or bus (not the green alternative though). This can also save time so that you can go polé polé once you get there. You could also take a better class of transport and improve the quality of your lodges for better rest. Of course, these all cost more, so budget for the possibility up front.
- Stop and rest — If you still find yourself physically overstretched on your journey, you can stop from time to time in order to recuperate. Try to arrange it so that the place you stop is truly restful. Beaches and rural retreats are best.
Get fit for travel with an exercise program
If you’re not in good physical condition, consider starting an exercise regime in the months prior to departure. Lose some weight, too, if that will help.
This is especially true if you plan to do vigorous activities like hiking, trekking, bicycling, caving or adrenalin sports.
The usual caution applies — especially if you are older or are overweight or are managing a medical condition or are normally very inactive. Don’t jump into a program of vigorous exercise without consulting your doctor.
Mental readiness
Most of us are totally enthused about our upcoming trip. It’s a good thing to feel so positive. But the reality once you’re out in the world can be challenging. If you’re traveling solo, you could feel lonely, isolated and homesick from time to time. Foreign cultures can be strange and hard to function in. A language barrier only exacerbates any problems.
Your patience and endurance will be tested, more often if your travel style is basic and low budget. Some travelers experience the negatives too intensely and break down. Don’t be one of them.
A huge contributor to mental wellbeing while traveling is good preparation, including researching your destinations and taking care of logistics. If you have booked your first night’s lodging and know which bus to take from the station, you won’t find yourself totally stressed as you troop through the rain trying to find an available room after dark.
If you have mental health issues before traveling
Unless you have a severe problem, there’s no reason you can’t take care of yourself and travel.
Perhaps you’re subject to depression, anxiety or mood changes. Ormaybe you use alcohol or other drugs more than is healthy. Travel can bring these issues to the surface and even make them worse. Booze, for example, is ridiculously cheap in many middle and poor countries. And there’s nobody to keep you from drinking all you want.
Speak to your doctor or specialist (if you have one) or ask your travel clinic for a referral. Be frank with the doctor about your issues, any medication you’re on and any addictions you’re battling.
Doctors are quite conservative about health risks (especially if the doctor doesn’t know you well enough), so you may be told that travel is inadvisable, at least for now. It’s still your call.
When looking for travel medical insurance, you will find that many policies have mental health issue on their exclusion list. If you have been diagnosed with a mental health issue, whether or not it was actively treated, you must divulge it in your insurance application. You may then have the option of adding a rider to include your mental health condition in your medical insurance coverage. Or you may have to consider a competing policy that will include it. If you don’t have coverage, any treatment you receive while traveling will be billed directly to you.
Pre-departure checkups
If you’re leaving on a long trip, fitness for travel could include a battery of checkups before leaving. You can get medical, dental and optical services in destination countries and the service can be both professional and inexpensive in some of them. However, you need reassurance that your body is good-to-go before you depart. Besides, who wants to spend a couple of days stuck in a boring city finding and waiting on a dentist?
Medical checkup
If you’re young and healthy, you might not need a medical checkup, especially if your trip is not so long. But if you’re older, overweight or have known or suspected conditions, you should get a checkup. Even if you’re not climbing Kilimanjaro body will be challenged — at least by long weary days and the odd stressful situation — so reassure yourself that you’re fit for travel.
- Tell your doctor your plans — Tell your doctor where, when and for how long you intend to travel. This is so that he or she knows that your body will be getting stress-tested in unfamiliar territory, eating unfamiliar food and exposed to unfamiliar bugs. General Practitioners are not travel medicine specialists, so there’s a tendency for them to be over-cautious about your prospective health risks. However, your doctor might have concerns about existing conditions, medications or other issues and may suggest tests before you go.
- Travel insurance medical exam — In some cases (especially if you are 60+), your travel insurance provider might require a medical examination in order to provide you with coverage against health risks — make sure you know before booking a medical, as your insurer will have a form for your doctor to fill out.
- Special attention — There are body issues that you might pay special attention to while consulting your doctor:
- Mobility — Problems with your feet, ankles, knees or legs in general.
- Digestion — Travelers are famously vulnerable to unfamiliar stomach bugs. If you have issues at home, plan for healthy eating and drinking while abroad and ask your doctor about appropriate treatments for digestive upsets.
- Skin — If you have sensitive skin and you’re going to spend a lot of time in the tropics, at high elevation or doing outdoor activities (regardless of latitude), make a plan to protect yourself. This is partly clothing that protects you from UV radiation, partly effective sun-screen and partly staying out of the sun when your activities don’t require it. If you have a lot of moles, you might consider a “mole map” to check for sun damage or melanoma when you get back.
Drug prescriptions
If you’re taking regular prescription medications, ask your doctor to issue fresh prescriptions for enough drugs to cover your entire trip (unless your drugs are subject to spoilage within the time of travel).
- Get prescriptions with generic drug names — If you need your prescription abroad, name brands of common drugs may not be available or even known. Some doctors, incentivized by Big Pharma, like to prescribe name brands, but you should insist — just this once anyway — on generic drug names.
- Fill prescriptions at home — You can get common generic drugs in most countries and they may be much cheaper than at home. However, many poor countries have a problem with low quality local generics or even counterfeit brand name drugs with little or no potency. In rich countries, your prescriptions from home may not be honored, forcing you to see a local doctor to get a fresh prescription.
- Keep drugs in original packaging — Get loose pills, capsules, lozenges if you can, packaged in the smallest bottle that will hold them. You don’t need a big bottle with the top half stuffed with cotton. Don’t get drugs in sheets of blister packaging — the same supply of drugs in blister packs takes up way more volume. To satisfy nosy customs inspectors, take care that the pharmacy sticker on the bottle remains legible.
- Keep your prescriptions handy — You should travel with your original prescriptions (copies in your cloud storage), to show to customs officials or to seek a refill.
- Controlled medications & injectable drugs — What if your essential meds are restricted or even banned by one or more of your destination countries? The last thing you need is to have your supply seized by customs officials. You probably know if your regular medication is “controversial” and can check with the embassies of your destination countries. Have an official letter from your doctor, on hospital letterhead, describing your need.
Dental checkup
You should consider a dental checkup as well, especially if you haven’t had one in the last 12 months. Getting something painful while traveling is going to be a hassle at the very least. Searching out a decent dentist could knock you off your itinerary and possibly cost a lot. In some places, you may worry about hygienic conditions too.
Dental work can be very professional and inexpensive abroad. Depending upon your destination, you could consider getting dental procedures that don’t require a long course of treatment done while traveling. In fact, if dental isn’t covered by your insurance at home, a check-up, cleaning and other simple procedures are well worth getting done for much less in a middle or poor country destination like the Philippines, India, Ecuador or South Africa where it’s easy to find spotless clinics and well-trained staff.
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Dental emergencies in Africa
Optical checkup
If you wear prescription lenses (eye glasses or contact lenses) you might consider getting an optical checkup, although it’s not really necessary if your prescription has been stable for a couple of years.
- New prescription — If you get checked, make sure you get a written prescription for corrective lenses, even if your prescription hasn’t changed. That way, should you need new glasses while traveling, you won’t have to see an optometrist first.
- Contact lens prescription — If you wear contact lenses, make sure that you get examined for contacts and that the prescription says so. Without this, a dispensing optician may refuse to sell you contacts.
Optical exams and products can be very cheap in many destination countries.
- Cheap or free testing — In some countries, it’s common for the dispensing optical shop to have it’s own optometrist, who will test your eyes for a small fee, or even free if you buy new glasses or contacts from the same shop.
- Inexpensive glasses — In poor and middle countries, even global brands of eyeglass frames can be much cheaper than in high-income countries.
Online resources
- Centers for Disease Control — The US government agency with worldwide scope on disease. Geographically comprehensive and up-to-date.
Do you have your travel vaccinations?
You may need as much as 6 months to get what you need.
Are you going to a malaria zone?
Assess your risk and know what behaviors and drugs you could use to avoid malaria.