One of our favorite parts of hiking in Nepal was coming across one of the many prayer wheel walls. Some were ornate and meticulously cared for, while others were made of old coffee cans with the prayers hand painted on them. We always took care to walk down the correct side, and spin each wheel as we passed by.
We’ve spent the last week lounging about and stuffing our faces on Koh Tao, in Thailand. My brother has been living on this little island for nearly 10 years, and even though we’ve been to visit him before, we never get tired of watching the sun set from one of the many local beach bars. After three days of clouds and rain we finally got a hot sunny day and were happy to sit at my brother’s bar, Maya Beach Club, sipping mojitos and checking out the longtail boats as they bobbed around on the tide.
We are 11 months and 12 countries into our journey and apparently all that excitement is just too much for my laptop to handle. It may have died on us completely, though we are holding out hope that if it can’t be totally rescued, we may at least be able to save the pictures from, ALL OF NEPAL that we stupidly did not back up on our USB hard drive that we bought for specifically that purpose.
Never get lazy with your back-ups people!
So, we’ll keep up with the Photo Fridays for the next few weeks, but keep your fingers crossed for our data recovery attempts, we need all the luck we can get.
I first went to Angkor Wat in 2005, and while there were plenty of visitors, it was nothing like our experience there last week. Tourism is booming in Cambodia and has definitely brought some changes. One of them is the inability for people to go climbing about on the temples as they please. In 2005 I snapped this shot of a monk climbing up the central tower in Angkor Wat. There was almost nobody else around and he had stopped to catch his breath, or perhaps just to admire the view and I happened to look up and catch him gazing out at the front of the temple complex. Today, you can’t just make your way up the crumbling stone steps, they have built wooden platform stairs on top of the originals, you have to wait in a long line to go up, and you are restricted to a brief 20 minute visit. It was sort of a bummer to not be able to wander at our leisure, though the new rules do make it safer, and better for the preservation of the temples.
Hiking up to the Thorong-La Pass on the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal was one of the most difficult days of our 12 day trek. We were both feeling a bit loopy from the altitude, and I had been battling a little headache since the night before, which was creating a bunch of stress about whether I was going to suffer the consequences of altitude sickness before I managed to make it to the top of the pass. We were so immersed in our own thoughts that it took a while for us to notice that the thick fog that we’d been hiking through for the last hour was no longer surrounding us. We turned around and realized that we’d broken through the clouds and could finally see some of the peaks behind us. We had just a few minutes of this view before the clouds rose up and obscured the views again. It was a good reminder to stop every once in a while and take a look at the majesty that surrounded us.
We went to Nepal to get away from the cities and the pollution and the general chaos of constant travel. We knew that hiking the Annapurna Circuit would be both challenging and rewarding, and our entire trip to this lovely country revolved around the hike. That is, until I got sick.
We had just finished our 150 kilometer trek and we were incredibly sore, but feeling really good about successfully carrying our own gear and still making it all the way through on our original schedule. I went to bed that night dreaming of relaxing back in Kathmandu with a giant burger and a beer.
The next morning I woke up feeling, off. It was cloudy and we suspected our flight out of Jomsom would be cancelled, but we dragged ourselves out of bed at 6am and headed to the airport anyways. By 8am it was crystal clear that not only was the flight not going to happen, but also that I was getting sick. I spent the next 20 hours attempting to fight off a fever and shivering uncontrollably despite being buried in both of our sleeping bags AND two huge blankets. I figured this was my body’s way of getting back at me for all the long and punishing days of hiking.
The next morning I still felt unwell, but our flight was set to go so I rallied myself and managed to survive both the flight as well as the very long and bumpy bus ride back to Kathmandu. I figured once I had a good shower and some clean clothes I would be feeling much better.
I was wrong.
Justin kindly took a photo of me feeling quite ill. In retrospect, I don’t look nearly as bad as I felt at this point.
I woke up in the middle of the night, feverish again, and started to worry that something was really wrong. By the next afternoon I still had the fever and it seemed to be getting worse. We started to think I might have gotten malaria, despite taking anti-malarial meds all through India. Justin called the US Embassy to get a recommendation for a doctor and we were directed to the CIWEC clinic, which caters mostly to foreigners and expats.
A few hours and many vials full of blood later I was informed that I would not be going back to the hotel that day. The good news is that I didn’t have Malaria. The not so good news is that they thought I had Typhoid Fever, though they sent out some blood cultures just to be sure.
Typhoid Fever is typically transmitted to travelers by an infected person who does not wash up properly after using the toilet, and then prepares food. I had gotten the vaccine but the doctor said that while it’s ok to have, it’s really not much more protection than having an umbrella with a huge hole in it during a thunderstorm.
I was started on a series of both oral and IV antibiotics and told that the fever would likely not be getting any better until the infection was cleared. They were right. I had a raging fever, reaching 102.5 – 103 degrees most days, for a total of 10 days. The fever was accompanied by stomach pain, a complete inability to eat more than a few bites of toast at a time, and some of the worst headaches I’ve ever had.
During one of my better moments I manage to use the hospital’s wi-fi to break up the monotony of the day.
After a few days the blood tests came back, but they were all negative. After that I had to give blood samples every few days so that they could test for other types of bacteria and viruses, and in the meantime they added two more antibiotics to the mix just to cover all the bacterial bases.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity in the hospital, though it was really just about a week, the fever broke and stayed away for 24 hours. Armed with baggies full of the rest of the antibiotics, I was released from the clinic, even though there was never a definitive diagnosis as to what I had. The medical records I was given when we left the hospital state that it was a case of “possible Typhoid” since the blood tests apparently often come back negative when up to 50% of the time they should be positive. It’s been 5 days, I’ve finished the antibiotics, and am finally feeling more like myself again.
After all our time preparing for the Annapurna trek, it’s frustrating that we didn’t have any time to revel in the accomplishment immediately after completing the journey. The illness came on so fast, and so strong, that it seems like that’s the only thing that happened in Nepal. We’ve finally managed to pull the hundreds of photos of the hike off our memory cards and now we need to sit down and make a point to go through them and focus on those 12 days of struggle and success so that the better memories can rise up to the surface and overtake the blur that the fever created.
In the meantime, we are hanging out in Thailand, re-acquainting ourselves with our old friend ‘beer’, and making plans to go visit my brother, who lives a life full of awesome on a little island in the Gulf of Thailand.
The Parallel Life 