Worse, somehow, is when you can see plenty but none of it’s fit to drink.

Clean Water & Travel Writing

Tripbase, an online travel research company, has put together a series of books that include work from world famous travel writers like Rolf Potts to, er, rather-less-famous-but-hopefully-mildly-interesting writers such as my good self.

A Range of Free Travel Books

Titles include Worldwide Travel, Travel Tips, Foodie Travel, United States Travel, Italy Travel, Worldwide Beaches Travel and Family Travel and you can download free e-copies right here.

For every book you download, Tripbase contributes $1 to charity:water, a charity devoted to providing clean water for developing countries.

To find out more about the work of charity:water, visit their website here. There’s nothing to lose with this offer, other than a few minutes of your time and bandwidth. Read, enjoy, return!

By stevefaeembra

If you have been following this blog for a while, you may remember reading about a good friend of mine who died last September.

To honour his life and to raise money for relevant charities, ten friends pounded the streets of Paris in his name.

Many of you have been kind enough to contact me both on the blog and in private to wish my friends luck and to offer me support.

It only seemed right, therefore, that I should update this section, even though it has such a tenuous link to travel and even though I can still only write about it in such stilted sentences.

I’m happy to say that all ten friends completed the marathon, with each person achieving a personal best for them. An eleventh friend then also completed the London marathon in record time last weekend.

For those of you who still wish to donate, the page is still open here.

For everyone, I would still repeat the message I’ve been saying again and again over the last year: please, please, please learn how to do CPR. You never know when you will get the chance to save a life.

Thank you for reading this far. Normal travel blogging will be back soon…

Broken Chair, Place des Nations

The Broken Chair jolts out of the dreary Place des Nations in Geneva. Surrounded by steady traffic and standing opposite the European UN Headquarters, I found its size, odd rust-green colour and geometrical imbalance surprisingly fascinating.

Broken Chair was commissioned by Handicap International to help persuade governments to ban landmines.

Broken Chair, Outside the European UN Headquarters

Sudden Death in Adults

Broken Heart by CarbonNYC

Death isn’t something that most of us like to think about, particularly when we’re young. Sadly, that doesn’t make any difference. Around 500 young people die every year in Britain for no clear reason from an adult form of “cot death.” Cardiac arrhythmias (strange heartbeat patterns) are thought to cause most of these deaths. I’m not here to frighten you because there are things that you can do. 

Number One – Learn CPR.

Learn it, learn it, learn it – and then keep on practising and refreshing your skills. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: it’s most likely to be someone you love who collapses in front of you with a cardiac arrest. Scientific studies show that effective CPR doubles that person’s chance of survival. Please, please, please learn how to do it. If you live in the UK, the British Heart Foundation and St John’s Ambulance run courses. I’m happy to be updated about courses elsewhere. 

Number Two – Support a Relevant Charity

Here’s where it gets more personal. 

Long term fans of this blog may remember that I wrote a post about visiting the Peak District based on a HAG (combined Bachelor and Bachelorette party) that I went to for a very close friend of mine. 

Suddenly Gone

His name was Leigh Jepson, a wonderfully caring doctor with a searing sense of humour and a great love for the outdoors and travel. He’d cycled across America, climbed Mont Blanc and took disabled children skiing. He also worked umpteen antisocial hours a week in his local Emergency Department and had entered into the Paris Marathon the previous day. 

He died without warning on September 21^st.  Aged 32. Now a group of his (far more unfit) friends plan to run the Paris Marathon in his honour, to raise money for charities that suit both his life and death. 

How You Can Help

Floating Heart - By Nganguyen

1)      Learn CPR– Please.Learn it, learn it, learn it. There really is no excuse – and no substitute. 

2)      Share this blog post

– tweet it, facebook it, link to it, email it, please just spread the word. 

3)      If you’d like to make a donation

– please visit http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/RunningForLeigh. Anything you give will be greatly appreciated and will help. 

If you’ve read this far – thank you.

I know how precious your time is and how many good causes crowd in on you all the time. If you can’t afford to donate and you don’t want to forward this post, please at least consider learning how to do CPR. 

Thanks for reading, folks.

Read the postscript to this blog post here.

I’ve been doing this for years now, on both plastic and real people, but I was half way up Kilimanjaro, lost in ice, rocks and darkness, before the obvious question finally crossed my mind: who would resuscitate me if I got ill?

Through fading torchlight, I surveyed my fellow trekkers and stayed close to the one I knew was a doctor. It’s handy to have qualified friends.

I remembered this slow chill of fear when reviewing the Resuscitation Council’s manual this morning. One phrase, in particular, caught my attention.

That means that if the person you’re travelling with collapses with a cardiac arrest, you can double their chances of survival by performing effective CPR. Or, to look at it another way, if YOU collapse with a cardiac arrest and no-one around you can do CPR then your chances of survival are halved.In other words, it’s not what you know; it’s what the people around you know.

 CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation – and it’s a combination of chest compressions and ‘mouth-to-mouth’ that can be taught and learnt in only a few hours.

*Only kidding – except for the plastic doll part. Waving electric paddles around equals an instant fail and yelling anything earns you an instant slap in the face.
RESUSCITATION COURSES

The American Heart Association - runs a Class Finder website
St John’s Ambulance in the UK runs First Aid Classes

Note – you need to PRACTICE this. Stay away from online-only courses.

I have no connection to or sponsorship from any of the organisations mentioned. If you know of somewhere reputable that organises this training then please add them as a comment.

Flatline photo credit here

By Jesse Kruger

TOULOUSE, SOUTH FRANCE

I crawled to the side of the road, my screaming heartbeat drowning out the world. My limbs felt like phantoms but through the fog of nausea I realised that they were all there, all moving. On reaching the pavement, my body surrendered and I collapsed.

In motor vehicle vs cyclist I had been granted a last-minute pardon.

There’s never an easy time to have an accident, but being abroad dials up the intensity. Like most savvy 21st-century travellers I had thought I’d taken care of things: travel insurance – check, vaccinations – check. I’d even been organised enough to photocopy my important documents and leave them with a responsible adult (a.k.a mum.)

But I didn’t know the phone numbers for the emergency services. Oh, I knew where I’d written them down, could see the list trapped beneath the fridge magnet. But what good was that?

Despite 380 000 tourists needing emergency services in the EU each year, few health advice sites mention what now seems ludicrously obvious: learn the emergency services numbers for the country you’ll be in.

Stranger yet, while researching this post I discovered that the European Union already has a univeral emergency number: 112. Since 1991, knowing this one fact allows you direct access to response units in 27 member states.Even better, many networks also employ interpreters – using English as the backup language. It seems I am not alone in my ignorance – 4 out of 5 Europeans don’t know it exists.

Incidentally, the international Mayday distress call results from an anglicized spelling of the French for help me - “M’aidez!” While I gasped for breath, a French knight in a shining Renault squared up against my attacker, announced himself as a witness and offered to make the call.

By some miracle my bike pedal was at bumper height when the car struck. An inch either way and my leg would have taken the full impact. Instead, both metal pedal and crank crumpled, my helmet battled with the pavement – and lost – and the rest of me spun across the tarmac, rag doll style.

Finally I’m home, watching shades of violet appear over my skin and making plans to replace my battered helmet when my ankle’s up to the task.

I’m also entering 112 into my mobile phone – under “E” for Emergency.