thewills\’wanderings

I don’t think I could talk about a trip to Nepal without talking about sickness. Almost ever foreigner you meet tells you about when and how sick they were while they were here. It seems that almost everyone gets sick. For those of you who aren’t interested in reading about the details of our bellies and bowels, please don’t read on. I know most of you won’t be able to help yourselves though. There’s nothing like enjoying someone elses pain.

While at Haibung, Diana and Lyndsay went down first and spent quite a bit of time getting aquainted with the squat toilet. Fortunately, they had recovered by the time we set off on the trek.
Tim was the next to go down and did a spectacular power chunder with his head outside the bus heading to the start of the trek. Luckily, he made quite a quick recovery and felt much better after decorating the side of the bus. A lot of the buses in Nepal have a familiar pattern permanently stained down the side of the bus. Yuk!
Well, we trekked for two days with Diana still recovering but managing to soldier on without too much drama. We arrived at Langtang and within a couple of hours Glenda and Charlotte started vomiting. In the teahouses the walls are like cardboard and the two of them were in rooms next to each and were almost vomiting in unison! Charlotte who absolutely adores Glenda would occasionally say between bouts of vomiting, ”Poooor Glenda, she’s very sick!”
Hari, our guide was very concerned and at first thought it might be the effect of altitude as we’d just reached about 3300m. However, during the night Ashleigh and Nick started and we soon realised that it wasn’t altitude but some bug or food poisoning or something. Hari was awesome running around in the middle of the night finding bowls and helping us clean up and generally acting like a mother to us all! The hard thing about being sick in a place like this is that there’s no hot running water, so the next day we spent quite a bit of time handwashing outside at the tap.

We decided to stay put for another day until everyone recovered. By 4pm I was feeling seedy and it wasn’t long before it was all on. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything quite as violent in the bowel department and I have to confess to being trapped in my sleeping bag with the zip jamming and being unable to get out in time. That has to be a low point in my life. Poor Tim had to do a big clean up job (……in sickness and in health…….) Not only that, but I had swapped sleeping bags with him because his was warmer! Tim Simpkin was next to go down , followed soon by Mark, so it was now 7 out of 12 of us!
By the next morning though, apart from Charlotte who was still not looking that great, most of us were much better. Our family decided to wait another night in Langtang until Charlotte was much better and join the others up at Kyanjin Gompa where we’d be staying put for 8 days. The next day we headed up to join the others and all was well in camp.
The next day Tim, Lyndsay,Tim S, Nick, Mark and Diana headed off for their acclimatisation climb on Yala Peak(see expedition post). Now, I thought my sickness had been hideous, but I soon learned when they all came back that there could be a worse place to be violently sick, inside a small 2 person tent in a snowstorm at altitude. This poor person, who shall remain nameless, had to resort to using his eating bowl as a toilet and let’s just say it was not good and there was a lot of discussion regarding what should be done with this bowl and whether even after cleaning it with boiling water, it will ever be the same again!(why would you want to keep it?)

After this we were all pretty healthy for quite some time. I think our guts started to toughen up. There was is, however one last sickness story that Ashleigh has given me permission to tell. Near the end of the trek, we were staying in a teahouse that was 2 storied. The bedrooms were upstairs and our big girls were very excited to get a room with the fireplace flu coming up through their room from the living room below. It was the warmest room in the lodge. We were in the room next door and in the middle of the night we heard that tell-tale call “Mum!” and then splatt! on the wooden floor. Now that wouldn’t be so bad if she hadn’t leant over the bed and vomited onto the chimney flu which had huge gaps down the side of it,(so big that you can see down to the next floor). I guess you can imagine what happened, yes, vomit dripped down the chimney to the floor below. Luckily there weren’t a whole bunch of trekkers sitting below enjoying the warm fire!Nasty! Poor Ash!

Apart from the above extreme moments on the whole the kids coped really well and were pretty healthy. Michaella got the award for not really being sick at all and Maddison for best recovery! (I forgot to say that when 7 of us were sick, she just vomited once and was completely fine 5 minutes later.)We were amazed that Charlotte didn’t get sicker considering she loved digging in the dirt and was always grubby and seems to spend a lot of time with her finger up her nose!

We’re hoping Nepal has prepared our bodies for S E Asia and that we’ll have built up some immunity.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 8:25 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.