Sharing some safety measures that I follow during my solo trips. Many or all of them could also be used in family or group trips.
- Share your itinerary and whereabouts — Inform someone about your whereabouts. It’s easy to make a group on WhatsApp or a similar platform consisting of your family members or close friends. Set it up during the trip planning phase itself and post your itinerary, tickets, visas, and other relevant details here. When on the trip, post your day\’s travel plan, mode of transport, and stay bookings. You can also post photos of the places you have visited, new food you tried, and your experiences to keep it exciting. This will certainly help in case of emergency but also keep your loved ones free from worries about you. You can also install location tracking and sharing apps like life360 to share your current location with some people you choose.
- Sufficient internet data pack: Keep sufficient data packs so that you can do some research whenever required. It’ll also help you sync photos and videos to the cloud which mitigates the risk of losing them. A pack of a few GB / day would be enough if you don’t take too many high-resolution photos or videos. One can also carry a spare phone or sim card from a different cellular company.
- Downloaded offline maps: You might end up in a no/weak network region during your travel. The downloaded maps in Google Maps will help in such circumstances to navigate in offline mode.
- Google Translate app: The Google Translate app will help in communicating with people when they don’t understand your language. It has features like translating voice conversation, scanning the images, and translating or you can type text to translate. Always remember to download the languages you need beforehand so that at least the basic features will work even without the internet.
- Emergency card/tag: Print your name, blood group, and emergency contact numbers on a piece of paper of card size and get them laminated. Print multiple such cards and keep them in places where people might look in time of emergency like a wallet or purse, car’s glove box, bike’s handle, backpack, etc. You can use the plastic strip lock to hang them as a tag too. You can also include allergic information or any medicine you take for any chronic ailment.
- Emergency contact numbers: Collect emergency contact numbers like highway helpline, police, hospitals, embassy helpline, etc. handy in a file on your mobile phone and a printout in your bag. This will save time and speed up action in case of an emergency.
- First aid and medicines: Keep a first aid bag and some basic medicines for general health issues. If you are on an adventure trip, keep muscle relaxants and emergency cardiac drugs like sorbitol and aspirin. Take your family doctor’s help to get the list of medicines to carry.
- Power backup: Keep a power bank for cases when the battery gets drained. You will be able to take photos without any need to worry about your mobile’s battery getting drained.
- Copies of key documents: It’s good to keep pictures and hard photocopies of your passport, tickets, and other important documents. This will help you in case you lose your original documents.
- Hard cash: With the usage of digital transactions, we mostly do not need physical currency. But it’s important to keep some amount in cash for emergencies. For international travel, you can keep US Dollars as a backup along with the country’s local currency. USD is easiest to get converted if required.
If you follow anything else which you feel should be included in the list, please share in the comment.