Hello again. Yes its me, your friendly neighborhood travel buddy. Back so soon to write another blog post! I am desperately trying to get caught up so that I don't give up and abandon the blog altogether. I thought about skipping this blog post since we just detailed the highs and lows of being sick during the Everest trek, but Jordan said it was too funny not to post. So, here we go.
Two days after returning from Everest, we were back in Kathmandu, basking in the glory of being kinda clean and eating something other than fried noodles. We went out on the town with our new New Yorker friends. We moved up our Thailand flight to a mere 5 days away. Yes, things were looking good. Jordan talked me into moving from a guesthouse to a hostel. Now up until this point, we had stayed in guesthouse or hotel rooms with attached bathrooms while we were in the city. But as a social experiment and as a money saver, we decided to give the whole dorm room thing a try. Our hostel had a very cool vibe and seemed to have interesting and social travelers. Yes, this would be a good experience.
Our first night in the dorm was pretty uneventful, apart from the fact that sharing a room with 6 other people is a little annoying when said people come in at all hours of the night, at all stages of drunken-ness. Not to mention the door to our room had a very persnickety lock, which made for a 5 minute long, knob rattling, key cranking, expletive-slurring process to get the door open. Now imagine 6 drunk people trying to get in the room at any hour between 1 and 3 am. Like I said, a little annoying.
Anyways, the next day Jordan and I ran some errands in Thamel (tourist neighborhood) and found a delicious Israeli restaurant, serving the freshest looking salads we had seen since Seattle. Now it had been 5 weeks since I'd eaten a fresh fruit or vegetable, and these salads were too delicious to pass up. Plus, they were more expensive than any other meal we'd had, so they had to be safe. Right? And it said right there on the menu, "Our produce is soaked in iodine water and then washed in filtered water". It has to be safe! Whether or not the salad made me sick, I'll never know. But we ate there twice that day, salads for lunch and dinner. I went to bed early that night and woke up around 11pm a little queasy. That's funny, I sleepily thought. Its probably just because I ate a basketball-size amount of salad. It will pass, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. But it didn't go away. The nausea persistently got worse until I was fully awake and fully uncomfortable. Still I wasn't sure I would have to puke yet, but better to make a plan now, just in case. If I do have to puke, I'm not going to be able to make it to the bathroom, because of the pesky broken doorknob. It will take me 5 minutes to get the door open and I'm sure I will just have to puke on the floor by then. The window, I decided, was my best option. It was right next to my bed and in an emergency I could get it open quickly and hurl there.
Meanwhile, two of my drunk dorm mates were drunkenly trying to "get it on", shall we say. I don't know much about these two lovebirds, but I'll let you know what I gleaned. The guy, who had some stupid name like Marty, had the most Americany American accent I've ever heard. But he told everyone at the hostel, when asked "where ya from", "well my parent's are Australian and Swedish. But I live in Bangladesh." Interesting. When pressed by other Aussies as to what part of Australia he was from, he said reluctantly "uhhh...MelBORNe" Pronounced just that way. Now, I've never been to Oz but I know enough. And Aussies pronounce Melbourne as "MelBUN". Right, Marty, I'm sure you're from Melbourne. Or Indiana. Anyways, Marty was trying to seduce a cute New Zealand girl, who was trying her best to act like she wasn't a complete floozy. But Marty was persistent and they started to drunkenly talk about love and the meaning of life, and that was the ticket to the Kiwi girl's heart, or her pants.
Good God, I'm gonna puke from having to listen to this crap, I thought. Well, there is no way I'm going to get up and interrupt this romance unless I absolutely have to. But eventually I just couldn't lay there anymore. I was going to puke. I kicked off my covers, jumped out of the bottom bunk of the bunk beds, slammed open the window and proceeded to puke down two stories to the sidewalk. Thank God Jordan woke up, even though he was wearing earplugs. The lovebirds fumbled to put pants on and and then fumbled to get the door open. I guess nothing kills the mood like a girl puking right next to you. Finally the door was open and I ran out to the bathroom, just in time for another round of puking to start. Then, wouldn't you know it, my large intestine couldn't let my stomach have all the fun, so it started coming out both ends.
It went on like that all night. I timed it. I needed to puke every 45 minutes. For 7 hours. Did I mention yet, that the shared bathroom didn't have a door but a shower curtain for privacy? I finally stopped closing the door to the dorm room. It just took to long to get it open again. It was without question the most miserable I've even been in my entire life. The next morning I absolutely demanded that I move to a private room WITH a private bathroom attached! There was no way in hell I was spending one more minute in the dorm room with hungover people shuffling about while my head was spinning and my stomach was churning.
I couldn't eat for 3 days. Finally, the first day I felt well enough to walk around town again, I went with Jordan to get pizza. I took one step inside the restaurant and ran straight to the bathroom, dry heaving from the mere smell of cheese and tomato sauce. When I finally pulled myself together, I ordered plain steamed rice while Jordan chowed down on a Hawaiian pizza. But when my rice came, I couldn't stand the smell of that either. Jordan's favorite quote from the whole ordeal was me saying "I can't eat it. It smells too...rice-y". I spent our lunch hunched in the corner with my head turned to the window and my back turned to Jordan. It was very rude but I couldn't sit there and watch Jordan French kiss his pizza.
Three days later we flew to Thailand, where I've been trying to eat like its my job. Oh the joys of traveling.
Things I've learned about myself from this experience thus far:
I'm not a hostel person, much to Jordan's dismay. I want my own room. And preferably my own gosh darned bathroom.
Being at some level of sick is kind of an all-the-time thing when you are traveling in developing countries. Especially if you eat sketchy street food. And have delicious fruit shakes with questionable ice. You just get used to it.
I don't care about eating healthy at all. I eat the most greasy, oily, fattiest food I can find. Keeping weight on is more important than heart disease.
yuk. well done, storyteller.
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