Is there a CDC traveler's advisory page, or something like it, for Indonesians planning on traveling to the Americas? If so, is it filled with tons of ominous-looking vaccination recommendations color-coded for your convenience and with both a list of terrifying possible outcomes to the diseases AND terrifying posssible side effects of the vaccines?!

Is our continent coated with red ink on every page of disease-risk-area manuals? I realize that I am getting ridiculous here.

I went to Mexico with my best friend and deliberately did not read any cautionary medical websites. No, actually, I think I just forgot to. And I was covered in mosquito bites and humidly seeping wounds from brushes with sharp edges that wouldn't have even bled in Colorado's climate. This is extremely passive sentence structure - and you know what? I acted extremely passively to Mexico's environment. Nothing happened. I didn't feel well for a few days, but it didn't stop me from doing, oh, anything that we did. I didn't become encephalitic or go into a coma or have - what's that thing? - pulmonary edema. It was August and rainy and buggy as hell and we didn't wear repellent and trekked around in the jungle and saw breathtaking sunsets and got rained on and hit on by Mexicans, and not hit on by even more, nicer, Mexicans, and ate food from roadside travelling carts and guess what? It was GOOD. The roadside carts and everything else. We ate bean quesadillas and listened to the cart man talk about his upbrinding in Chiapas in careful, patient Spanish. I had to pee and it was raining. It was perfect.