Indonesia-No Eating For Three Days
I woke up early the next morning when it hit. The dreaded fate of so many travelers. Food poisoning. We don't know what it was from. We had a fancy Italian meal for dinner, and for lunch we had food that had been stored in the boat for who knows how long, at who knows what temperature and cooked who knows how well. We suspect the boat food was the culprit but we'll never know. Chelsea also wasn't feeling well but she wasn't quite as sick as me.
All I could do was go from lying in bed to the bathroom and back. No eating. No sleeping. No medicine would stay down...or up...or in...you get the picture. Thankfully I have some great friends with experience in medicine and/or traveling abroad who talked me through what to do (thanks to Liz and Jackie!). Chelsea was so good and kept me supplied with water and plain bread when I needed it to take medicine.
We were flying out of Labuan Bajo that afternoon...which was going to be a problem. The prospect of spending any time in a hot airport, or anywhere remotely uncomfortable in that condition sounded like death. Plus at that point there was noooooo way I would be able to make it on a plane without making some serious enemies of whoever was sitting next to me. I begged the front desk to beg them to let us stay in our room a few hours longer. There may or may not have been tears, and they did let us stay.
Eventually, we got the visits to the bathroom down to a manageable number and I miraculously flew disaster-free. Thank goodness we didn't have any layover problems this time. I found a drink called Pocari Sweat, which is like a Japanese version of grapefruit Gatorade and is delicious. I did google it to make sure it wasn't peccary sweat. Why you would name a drink a name that sounds like the sweat of a wild pig is beyond me. We went straight back to Jakarta and I went straight to bed, which I got out of two days later.
My plan had been to fly to Sumatra to go hiking in the jungle and look for orangutans the day after we got back from Labuan Bajo, but that was obviously not happening. I canceled my ticket and contacted the guide I had been planning to use. He was so understanding and even offered his knowledge of herbal medicine. I declined in favor of antibiotics and ondansetron, which ended up working out.
Thankfully he was really flexible and suggested I just come when I can and that he would personally take me on a tour instead of sticking me with a group. The people here, they are really something else.
P.S. slight backtrack, I just have to include this story. Chelsea and I took cabs to get around Labuan Bajo, but they don't really have official cabs, so basically you either just jump into someone's car and pay them to take you somewhere, or you find someone on the street who can call a friend with a car. They were very very willing to do this, and it's very cheap by American standards.
Well, we had many interesting cab experiences, but our favorite was the cab driver who pulled up with his buddy in the front seat. They had a karaoke video playing on the car's display, and apparently just drove around, singing English karaoke with OK translations running across the bottom. When we got in the car, they did not turn it off, but blasted the music and sang along to the video while they drove us around. We think this is probably how James Cordon got the idea for his show.
We were flying out of Labuan Bajo that afternoon...which was going to be a problem. The prospect of spending any time in a hot airport, or anywhere remotely uncomfortable in that condition sounded like death. Plus at that point there was noooooo way I would be able to make it on a plane without making some serious enemies of whoever was sitting next to me. I begged the front desk to beg them to let us stay in our room a few hours longer. There may or may not have been tears, and they did let us stay.
Eventually, we got the visits to the bathroom down to a manageable number and I miraculously flew disaster-free. Thank goodness we didn't have any layover problems this time. I found a drink called Pocari Sweat, which is like a Japanese version of grapefruit Gatorade and is delicious. I did google it to make sure it wasn't peccary sweat. Why you would name a drink a name that sounds like the sweat of a wild pig is beyond me. We went straight back to Jakarta and I went straight to bed, which I got out of two days later.
My plan had been to fly to Sumatra to go hiking in the jungle and look for orangutans the day after we got back from Labuan Bajo, but that was obviously not happening. I canceled my ticket and contacted the guide I had been planning to use. He was so understanding and even offered his knowledge of herbal medicine. I declined in favor of antibiotics and ondansetron, which ended up working out.Thankfully he was really flexible and suggested I just come when I can and that he would personally take me on a tour instead of sticking me with a group. The people here, they are really something else.
P.S. slight backtrack, I just have to include this story. Chelsea and I took cabs to get around Labuan Bajo, but they don't really have official cabs, so basically you either just jump into someone's car and pay them to take you somewhere, or you find someone on the street who can call a friend with a car. They were very very willing to do this, and it's very cheap by American standards.
Well, we had many interesting cab experiences, but our favorite was the cab driver who pulled up with his buddy in the front seat. They had a karaoke video playing on the car's display, and apparently just drove around, singing English karaoke with OK translations running across the bottom. When we got in the car, they did not turn it off, but blasted the music and sang along to the video while they drove us around. We think this is probably how James Cordon got the idea for his show.
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