Food Poisoning

But it was not to be. A couple of hours after retiring at the ridiculously early hour of 6pm, I was back up again, rushing to the toilet for my first bout of Indonesian food poisoning. I threw up every couple of hours until about 6am, and I won't debase this travelogue by talking about my other orifices. There was no way I was going anywhere when Friday finally arrived: not only was I suffering from the intestinal equivalent of the levee breaking, but also I had the associated total lack of energy and interest.

L., however, had to head off, so I bade her goodbye through a haze of illness, promising to keep in touch and let her know how the rest of my trip went. All of a sudden I was on my own, frighteningly ill, and alternating between the toilet, my bed and the little shop down the road where they sold bottled water, as I didn't even have enough energy to operate my water filter. By lunchtime on Friday I was no better, so the losmen owner took me along the main road to visit the doctor. After filling in the paperwork and explaining the problem, I had myself weighed, had my blood pressure taken, and after refusing an injection, got given a collection of pills, tipped by the nurse from a collection of bottles that probably covered every illness from malaria to mumps. I had to take the little white one, the big white one and the big black one three times a day, and that was that.

Goodness only knows what the pills were, but they worked. Within an hour I was bunged up, able to keep my re-hydrating mixture down, and although I was feeling bloody awful, I was no longer exploding quite so badly. My temperature, which had fleetingly gone up, went back down and stayed down, and I managed a few bananas to start the digestive process working again. I had survived my first case of Indonesian food poisoning, though quite what had caused it remains a mystery. There was to be plenty more where that came from...