After cutting a trip short after catching a cold from a girl, I swore that there was NFW I would ever go to Asia again without this, and I haven't. Ditto for scuba trips. In PI it would be easy to catch cold by hopping from one air-conditioned club to another in the pouring rain.

You can get this at CVS and other drug stores. I haven't found anything like it in Asia:

http://www.neilmed.com/usa/sinusrinse.php

You just fill it up to the line with (preferably warm) distilled water. (30 seconds in a microwave will do it, but in hotels I put the squeeze bottle in the coffee pot or wash basin.) Dump in a packet of their pharmaceutical-grade salt, use it, repeat a couple of times, and it's goodbye cold.

You're breathing clear all day, and without drugs! It's awesome!

Thats a smart idea, I do something similar, I pack a 6 Oz. can of Ocean complete sinus irrigation in my checked luggage. It will last me 2 weeks if I use it every day.

I would NOT use the local tap water to mix up your solution, in a pinch you can go to a pharmacy in Pattaya and ask for a large container of saline solution to flush your sinus's with.

They sell the saline in Pattaya but all they have to dispense it with is a big syringe with a nipple, and it doesn't have enough flow rate. The Ocean product is news to me.

Trying to turn someone on to this is like Green Eggs and Ham.

I used to get colds/sore throats almost every trip to Brasil. In 2009, I think, they implemented a pretty strict no-smoking law. Since then, I don't think I've gotten sick one time.

Many of us don't notice it anymore, but you simply don't run into cigarette smoke much in the US unless you yourself smoke. Now maybe it's just a coincidence, but I do pretty much the same things I've always done, but the smoke is gone and so are the chronic colds.