My friendly neighborhood parasite
Gina. Arequipa, Peru.
I have a parasite (or hopefully, had). I´m not sure what kind, but the doctor I saw was pretty convinced that since I´d been sick for almost three weeks and didn´t have a fever or any other sign of infection that a creature of some kind was the culprit (I went to Hampi on Choquechaca which is the same street as the yummy Jack´s Cafe and as South American Explorers´Club. It was 60 soles for the exam and the doctor was very nice and spoke perfect English–and supposedly also French).
It was surprisingly easy to deal with. He prescribed Loratadine (which I looked up online before taking, just to be safe) and I just had to take 2 grams of it with food. I took them on Wednesday night and all day Thursday my mouth tasted very strongly and badly (metallic taste is a side effect of Loratadine, but I couldn´t pin it down as metallic. It was just bad). It´s now Saturday and we spent most of yesterday (10 hours) on a bus from Cusco to Arequipa. We went with Colca bus company because they were cheap–25 soles each–and were still recommended by SAE. I don´t think I would take this bus at night as they stopped often to pick up people along the road (Cruz del Sur, the high end bus company, does not pick up people along the way and so seems safer for nighttime travel since you don´t have to worry about people getting off with your stuff or unwholesome people being picked up and robbing everyone). It definetely wasn´t a luxurious bus. We had frontrow seats on the top floor, though, so we had a beautiful view of all of the countryside on the way. The downside was that we were in front of the tvs, so no movies (The Godfather and then some Jean-Claude Van Dam movie. How they could follow up the Godfather with some action flick I have no idea) and we also kept hitting our heads on the tv screen when we´d come back from the toilet.
It was a long day on the bus, and Steve was pretty unhappy with it. But I was pretty content to doze and look at the mountains, small houses and farms, alpacas, and even some vicunas as we got closer to Arequipa. We had a very friendly cab driver from the bus station who helped us find another hostel when the one we went to originally (picked from our travel book) was way too expensive. We now have a very nice hostel a few blocks from the main plaza with free internet (which is really fast. I just finished uploading the last of the photos from Cusco and am now starting to upload the Machu Picchu trek photos!), a tv in our room with lots of channels (I don´t usually watch tv, but it´s nice to have a movie or other silliness–they have a Korean channel!–for entertainment when you get back to your room around 7 at night), a friendly family with a cute dog, a bathroom with hot water in the room, and a tiny little kitchen we can use. We woke up pretty early this morning and had eggs, and now I´ve been doing internet things for the past couple of hours. As soon as this batch of photos is uploaded we´re going to go explore Arequipa as we got in a little too late yesterday to walk around.
We´re trying to decide if we want to do a tour of some sort here. There´s the Colca Canyon which is something like twice as deep as the Grand Canyon (ít´s more impressive in some way than the Grand Canyon, but I don´t remember exactly how) and there´s also a place called Valley of the Volcanoes that sounds really cool. But for today we´re going do touristy things like visit the Catedral and the famous Nunnery and hopefully eat burritos as we read about a cheap Mexican place nearby.
For now my tummy is feeling much better, so hopefully my parasite (or parsites–I´m unclear on this) is dead and gone. It´ll be nice to not have to worry about bad tummy anymore. And next time I think I´ll go to the doctor a little earlier (or better yet, hopefully there won´t be a next time).
Tags: Arequipa, Hampi clinic, parasites, Peru
montarsig
WOW That sounds like some scary stuff!! We are all keeping up with your blog and all the things you are doing and seeing. Sounds completely amazing. Everyone send their love!!