I've tried to see everything in the best light and embrace the new cultures that are different at every stop, but now I've come to realise that when people don't even know how to cook an egg without nearly killing the person they are serving it to their culture needs attention. According to the Lonely Planet (and this is clearly a statistic that they just made up) 50% of travellers get food poisoning in Myanmar. Being the traveller's bible and a bunch of authors who seem to think that getting ill is all part of the experience they actually kind of embrace that as adding authenticity to a place. I consider it a legitimate reason to send the Ghurkas back in, reclaim Burma as part of the British empire and add cooking to their school syllabus.
I don't get sick in Burma. I fly out celebrating this fact only to order an egg in Bangkok and get salmonella (that's a self-diagnosis - it could be denge fever, I'll never know). I'm supposed to fly to Luang Prabang the day after I arrive in Bangkok, but I am so close to death I decide Laos might just push me over the edge. So I lie low in Bangkok for another couple of days. It's a difficult balancing act being ill when on your own. You constantly need to check you can still walk so that if you need attention you can still go and get it from a doctor. But at the same time if you can still walk you probably don't need a doctor just yet. If you pass out no one will know so you have to constantly work out how close you are to unconsciousness and all the time you have to feed yourself to try and prevent that happening. But if eating makes you sick you have to find a restaurant close enough to your room that will give you enough time to eat, return to your room and then throw up the food you have just eaten. To sum it up my three days in Bangkok are a new low point on the trip.
I'm so fed up lying in my dark little hole of a room in Khao San that I decide Luang Prabang actually can't be any worse. So even though I feel no better I decide to go for it. My taxi driver would probably argue that this decision was a poor one after I throw up in the back of his cab, but I tip well and when you get right down to it, I just don't care.
Two hours later I'm in Luang Prabang. It's the second largest town in Laos with a population of 25,000. There are only seven people on my plane; some little Lao Airways twin-prop. The other people seem to have read their guide books as they arrive with $35 and a passport photo for their visa. For once I'm completely unprepared and to the other travellers I must look like a retard as I have neither a passport photo or the $35 (or indeed any kip - the local currency). The airport has no photo booth or money changer so I'm starting to think I'll have to head back to Bangkok. Luckily the Myanmar government had stapled a picture of me into my passport and the visa guy says I can use that. I borrow the dollars from some french couple and I'm in.
The airport has a baggage carousel and I think they are quite proud of it. Our bags are in the back of the plane with us and it would have been very easy for us to take them with us but protocol obviously dictates that the carousel must be used. So quarter of an hour after landing they turn it on. Seven bags come out, making use of about 4 metres of this 50 metre carousel, at which point it is turned off again. No doubt there are a few local kids missing out on an education so that I can experience that western convenience.
I check into some random guesthouse and carry on where I left off in Bangkok by rolling around on the bed, clutching my stomach and crying to myself. I pull myself together just enough to look around the town the next day. Their 'sites' are only worth seeing if you are easily pleased and have a special interest in low quality buddhas. I paid 20,000 kip to see buddha's footprint. I have no idea why. All I've done for the last month is complain about buddhist iconography and yet I still feel obliged to check it all out. This footprint is a particularly good example of why I'm about ready to write off the entire religion. It's a plaster cast of a couple of indentations in a rock with a gold foot painted around it. You have to give the monks some credit that they actually get stupid suckers like myself to give up $2 to see it.
I'm supposed to go trekking and kayaking for the next two days in the jungle, but after another night throwing up (and remember I've not eaten for 4 days so I have no idea where this stuff is coming from) I decide that, whilst I'm not exactly close to emergency medical help here, going into the jungle and moving even further away from western drugs would be wreckless in the extreme.
So two more days of lying around waiting to die ensue. It's now Monday. I've been sick for nearly seven days. This is the first day I've actually felt like I can sit further than 10 metres from a bathroom without risk of an embarrassing situation occurring, so I assume I am starting my recovery.
Why does anyone go travelling?
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1 comment:
Poor man. Maybe some deep fried worms from the high street market, near the round about will be good for you.
Ah, one tip. There is a Red Cross centre in Louang Prabang. I don't think there will be of much help but as they don't have much work they give the best one-hour Lao massages I had for just a couple of dollars.
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