Everyone knows that you don't drink the water when you travel to Latin America. Instead, you drink bottled water. It's perfectly all right, however, to use tap water for bathing, washing dishes and other water-based tasks. Vegetables are soaked in tap water with a disinfectant, Sanavida, added which is actually bleach.
Water used in drinking and cooking at home comes from a five gallon bottle, called a Garafóne, that is delivered to our complex weekly. Actually, we just buy a bottle from the family living in the bed and breakfast under us. They have ten children and use a lot of water. We have a simple hand operated pump that fits on top of the bottle, so we don't have to be moving it around a lot. We use about one five-gallon bottle of water a week and pay Q10 ($1.20) for it.
