The Scramble


“DID YOU GET YOUR TYPHOID SHOT?” newfound Blogreader and fellow traveler Jess asked me one night over sushi, a New York City staple.

“I already had one,” I told her.

“Typhoid’s only good for two years,” she informed me, information fresh in her mind since she was prepping to backpack around Bolivia.  “You should probably get another one.  It’d be a shame to get [a disease] that’s preventable.”

Upon a little research I discovered she was right.  The typhoid vaccination is only good for two years; in my yellow WHO travel health certificate I saw that I had two typhoid vaccines recorded, two years apart.  And so I called up my doctor and left a message at his busy family clinic to call me so that I could prevent a preventable disease in Africa.  Yes, it would be a shame if I got it.

THE TYPHOID VACCINATION was just one of the many chores left unattended in my preparations for my trip to Mali.  The past couple of weeks has been a whirlwind of chores, many of which did not pertain to travel preparation.  Between a day job, freelance projects due before I leave, setting up this new blog, pitching last minute articles to newspapers and magazines, finishing up an interview that Filipinas magazine is doing about me as a “celebrity blogger” for the April issue, and a quick weekend ski trip to Vermont (planned by someone else), I haven’t had much time to prepare for another adventure, let alone make a fancy Flash inspirational trailer like I’ve done in the past.  I’m paying for it now, the last two days before departure, scrambling left and right for last minute things, and my head is totally spinning and overwhelmed.  My doctor was also probably overwhelmed and frazzled with his hundred patients; he had called me back and left me a voicemail which ignored my request for a vaccination and mistakenly just gave me my cholesterol results again.

After a couple of rounds of phone tag with my current doctor (so not like my former doctor before TGT2), I eventually got my vaccination and was all settled—until I realized I should probably get malaria preventatives and went through the rigmarole again.  I should probably try and prevent that too, I figured, also recalling that I always thought “Malaria” would probably be a pretty name for a girl if it wasn’t so associated with an infectious disease.

And so, frantically but surely, I’m getting back into the game, hopefully in time for departure this Saturday.  I’ve gotten my passport back with a fresh new Malian tourist visa inside (picture above), bought some new gear, and tried to make some sort of a reservation for my first night in Bamako (they never e-mailed back).  In the next two days I have yet to finalize some projects, buy more gear, and put out any other fires I need to before I’m AWOL for three weeks.

After the craziness of everything going on in the hustle and bustle of New York City, I definitely feel I need a vacation, which I guess this trek through Mali is—although traveling to an underdeveloped, landlocked non-English-speaking African country on the fringe of the hot Sahara Desert, it’s hardly going to be a day at the beach—but at least I won’t get typhoid or malaria.

THE GLOBAL TRIP CONTINUES…
SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 2006.


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This blog entry was originally posted on March 16, 2006 on the blog, "The Global Trip: Trippin' To Timbuktu," hosted by Blogger.com. It is one of eighteen entries that chronicled a trip through the West African nation of Mali in March/April 2006.




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