Emergency Use Only

There’s a trend among the gnarlier long-term travelers to eschew travel insurance. The logic seems to be that travel insurance is for wimps.

Real men — and the naysayers are overwhelmingly blokes – travel light and cheap with few encumbrances, in the grand knapsack tradition of Wilfred Thesiger et al.

And it’s true that most of the times you buy travel insurance you’re not going to use it. The policy excess means that minor health issues – a trip to the doctor for antibiotics, a loose filling – are unlikely to be covered.

I’ve also yet to meet anyone who’s found travel insurance a cure for the most common of traveller’s woes, the waterproof camera which suddenly ceases to be waterproof – usually hours, if not days, from the nearest retailer.

To be honest, travel insurance is for emergencies. It exists to protect you against complete disasters, the sorts of things that cost you thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, to resolve without insurance.

The time when your backpack is lifted, on a beach, in the middle of nowhere, leaving you with only the swimwear you stand up in, and perhaps a sarong to preserve your modesty as you hitch a lift to the nearest town.

When your ferry goes down, taking all your possessions with it.

Or, as happened to me, when you get genuinely, seriously sick, in a third world country.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a public hospital in sub-Saharan Africa. But it’s terrifying. People basically come there to die. Training of staff is low to non-existent. Basic hygiene’s lacking. The chances of getting an accurate test done are negligible.

Lying there, watching the flies hopping on and off the IV drip that was pumping me full of anti-malarial drugs which I knew caused toxicity with the antimalarials I’d been using, the girl in the bed next to me hawking up blood and sputum onto the dirty floor, listening to the wails of desperately sick babies from the room next door, I realized that I could, well, die.

And travel insurance got me out of there. First to the capital and a clean, functional private clinic with fully trained doctors who spoke both French and English. And then on a flight home.

I might have got well in the public hospital. I might not have done. But, boy, was I glad I didn’t have to stay there.