Blood thinners in the Jungle? Am I Crazy?

Am I Crazy? As an autoimmune patient with APS, as a stroke survivor on blood thinners, people sometimes ask why I travel to places teeming with opportunities for disaster.

“Places where medical care is thin, the water is often unsafe and the food chancy; places with infectious diseases, malarial mosquitoes, venomous snakes and the wildest of animals; some places where the locals are just a few generations past headhunting.”

I have asked myself that question, many times, most recently when I set out for a month of temple climbing in India with my knee swollen and braced a week after suffering a “spontaneous” bleed. Just one of the aggravating hazards of a life on blood thinners. I answered my own question–Why go?– in an essay titled “Why I Still Travel to the Wild,” and wrote about it again yesterday in my travel blog JunglePants.com.

My essay was published in the anthology Chicken Soup for the Soul: Find Your Happiness, available at bookstores and on-line. I hope you’ll check it out.

Why venture to the wild?

The photos below provides a hint about why I venture afar.

For another perspective, read famed travel writer Paul Theroux’s eloquent essay about the siren pull of travel in New York Times, “Why We Travel in Turbulent Times.”