When I started to talk to people about coming to Mexico and was asking if there are things to watch out for, two things kept coming up over and over again. 1) Watch the water. Whatever you do, don’t brush your teeth with the water or drink it in the shower! 2) No paper in the toilet!
Both of these things seem to exasperate people after a while. They’ll never be an issue for me.
You see, the water at Haven is not potable. It is pure spring water that runs through cow pastures into our water system. There is E. coli and other nasty stuff in it. I ignored the warnings and drank it for a few days my first days at Haven, assuming I’d get used to the taste, and got a good sense of what the ‘turista’ is like… Keeping my toothbrush well away from the tap is something I consider normal now! Water on Isla will be managed exactly like it is at Haven, by keeping on hand two five-gallon containers of potable water and transferring the water into a more manageable container. The only difference is that I will get at home delivery!
As for the toilet paper thing, until later this past summer, when Willow Bunch got its wonderful new dump station (free!), dumping my holding tanks was a huge hassle. I was able to seriously extend the time between dumps by throwing the paper in the trash. I’d just bag it at the end of the day and throw the bag into my trash barrel, so the bathroom stayed cleaned. When I still had Neelix, I was dumping a bag of cat litter every day anyway, and then I just kept the habit of taking out a bag every evening.
So water and plumbing idiosyncrasies aren’t an issue for me and the telecom company is just as bad as any I’ve experienced back home. Mexico is feeling rather familiar. đ
We always used bottled water for drinking and cooking but I used tap water for my teeth, being careful to spit well. Was this the cause of the turista I got maybe three times in the first two or three years? Maybe, but I believe a resistance can be built up over time. Drink the yogurt stuff.
I do not mean a resistance can be built up to allow drinking the tap water, I would never try this, What I mean is a resistance to the odd little bit you might get from a glass that was not dried properly or a splash while washing your face.
Mexicans use bottled water, why wouldn’t we?
It’s not my country and I have no right to impose my views on it, but if it was my country that was trying to get out of the third world and be modern and make a better impression, I would want clean safe drinking water out of my taps and would not want to settle for bottled… I don’t like bottled water as a lifestyle choice. When I get my cabin set up, it will have a ceramic filtering system so that I can let go of the bottles.
We are on a well here in Canada that is so full of iron that everything it touches turns orange. We have a UV filtering system. On the road and in Mexico we use the 5 gallon jug system.
Contessa, the water in Yukon was the same way, very full of iron. I still have stains in my bathroom for the water there. At Haven, the water is just plain HARD. I’m getting very strong muscles from handling all those big jugs!
The reason one can’t drink tap water in Mexico is because the water system is not a closed system. The water leaves the the utility as potable and treated water but it flows through various open storage points where it might get contaminated. That is also the reason one pumps the water from a cistern up to rooftop tanks or tinacos and then there is gravity feed into your faucets.