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The desert is inevitable in Dubai and it is difficult to resist a safari. While we will feast in the dessert there will be no booze or belly dancing tonight because of Ramadam.
I don’t mind.
We traverse the dunes in Top Gear fashion while I weakly exclaim “Oh my god!”. I don’t really mean it as the track up the peaks and down the dips aren’t that scary.
While everybody else looks towards the sunset and the passing camel train, I turn my back to the sun to enjoy the light and shadow casting relief over contrasting textures of the sand.
The banquet is a typical tourist trap with hookah pipes, henna tattoos and a dreaded buffet. I should probably mention the cats wandering the tables with improbably large balls.
Despite sand in my shoes and sticking between my fingers and teabag tea (make an effort at least), the food seems okay.
Or so I thought.
The incubation period for bad food is some 12 to 24 hours. About 2pm the next day my stomach starts cramping but I ignore it. and have a peppermint tea in the spa.
I opt for a 15 minute steam and the massage room which seems a bit cool.
Now you can never be sure what you’re getting in a massage abroad. Is it legit or is it going to provide one of those messy but happy endings so beloved by my fellow countryman.
I’m given the choice between some disposable shorts and nudity but when I see my masseuse is a muscled filipino chap rather than a young Thai lady I decide on the shorts.
I do start to worry as his hand slips up the inside of my thigh uncomfortably close to my wrinkled scrotum. Soon I’m urging him harder and after 90 minutes of brutality it culminates in him rocking on my back ion his knees. I’m same after all.
I emerge battered and throughly worked out.
But I feel bloody awful. My whole body shakes and my teacup clatters on the saucer as my hand shakes uncontrollably. I can’t warm up in a warm shower and still outside in the 38C air I shake. My eyes are blurry and have spots in front on them and my mind feels it has been set in a large jelly and is isolated from the rest of the world.
I’m sick, very sick. Immediately I think I may have heatstroke but I’ve been wearing a Cambodian scarf over my head (prompting an Indian chap on a water taxi to ask if I’m Muslim) and keeping up my fluids apart from a two hour trip to the spice market.
It’s time to buy water. By 4 O’clock I’m back in my room falling into delirium.
The sluices open unleashing a rush of brown liquid to the toilet bowl, dripping down my leg and onto the floor as I rise. This is a pattern that repeats over the next two days.
My temperature is out of control and now I’m wearing a jumper. Later I strip off and later again the jumper is on again.
“Oh my god!” I should exclaim. But I’m too weak.
At 8pm I’m due for a special feast at Indego, the restaurant of Michelin starred Indian chef Vineet Bhatia at the swanky Grosvenor Hotel. It’s part of the whole point of this journey and the book I’m writing.
On a more serious note I’m also planning to buy the Martini Monster a snow-dome to add to her collection at the ski slope. Will she ever hand feed me ketamine ever again?
Faster than I can drink water I lose it. Stumbling to the courtyard I beg some salt and sugar from the kitchen and make myself a rehydrating mixture - 8 teasponns sugar and one salt to a litre of water. I am in such a state that I can hardly work out the simple calculations for 1.5 litres.
But it is no good. Brown sludgy water still comes out quicker than I can take dehydrating fluid in.
I cancel my dinner and stumble to the chemist for some proper mixed dehydration formula. All along I’ve taken the junior diarrhea tablets that I brought along (I should have got the serious shit kit from the Travelers Medicine Centre).
During the night I’m too hot and I wake to a soiled bed. I can’t stop it and dread my flight to England - some 2 hours in the airport, nearly 8 in the air and another 2 hour bus trip to my final destination.
Fortunately I have managed to stabalize myself and I’m taking on more water than I’m losing now. In the airport the only food aside from cakes I can find is fruit salad and I take a gamble that this is better than nothing at all.
I think I survive thanks to my “mind over bowel” technique that I invoke. It requires mental discipline developed over years of meditation (I also have a mind over vomit technique and am sure it would apply to pain if I wasn’t such a wimp).
For sale: one soiled iPhone
It works but not without my body letting go of its functions in the bathroom at my mother’s in Saffron Walden. Later I soil the heirloom linen sheets (from my granny, one of the original Traffords as in the football ground rather than the ones preceded by a de) on my bed that night and fear that we will have to cancel the Michelin starred meal we have planned for my Mother’s birthday on the fateful 9/11, the poor woman.
It turns out some plain silverbeet and chicken have helped further stabilize me and I think I’m up for the trip.
My working title for my travelogue was jokingly “Curry wallah: one man’s search for the perfect curry with only one spare pair of underpants (and a packet of moist wipes).
Sod that. I need several spare pairs of trousers and a nappy. Perhaps some elastics bands to stop everything dripping into my shoe. And wipes are useless in the circumstances.
Although I should also add this incident has nothing to do with curry but the poor handling and serving of food at a tourist gimmick. Beware.
Footnote: it actually takes me about 5 days to recover fully from this bout and I have to cut back my agenda and plan another trip to the UK next year.
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Crikey! Actually I know someone who did one of the sleep in the desert tours with the feast and their vehicle got lost getting back to the hotel.
Too much information!
But on the upside it would probably count as a “detox”!
After you fluanted foie gras and fresh porcini, I remember thinking,”Poor bastard, I know what’s going to happen next.” Sorry to read about that. Tell me though, did eating the same food as the cats cause your cods to engorge?
Holy shit!
I ALWAYS travel with two different strengths of travellers medication for diarrhea. If you are even a little bit of an adventurous eater you are destined to get something each trip, but yes, like you I have mostly fallen victim to tourist food.
Last trip saw me with a similar senario, (and I managed to lose a few kgs -think on the bright side!) my cramps were so bad I thought I was going to give birth, and then began the projectiling from both ends.
The joys of travel, it can only get better now.
Enjoy the currys.
Jack
Poor Ed. Similar thing has happened to me only once in my overseas travels, and that was in peru (I think it was a TGIF in Lima?!) and ever since i always travel with many a medicine just in case. My sister actually had to get an injection to stop her symptoms.
Hope you pick up very quickly and start eating some good food!
Mr Sticky had the same experience in Portugal and soiled a lovely pair of slacks in public. Years later, after dinner at Amulet in Hobart, he saved his trousers and simultaneously vomited in the bath whilst purging at the other end on the porcelain. Poor luv.
Commiserations. Hope you made it to Mater’s celebrations.
Always in my suitcase - Gastro-Stop & Gastrolyte. Without them I would never have seen Angkor Wat.
OMFG, you poor trout.
Opera nutter rendered two toilets un-useable on a Qantas flight to UK last year…the flight attendants went above & beyond & actually laundered his clothing, rang the Arizona University medical centre mid-flight for assistance & had a wheelchair waiting at Heathrow…at least we got through passport control & customs
très rapidement!
Oh my GOD - you poor thing! I’ve never experienced such horrors on any of my few travels. The most “unsafe” place I’ve been to was Romania. But sheesh - you had me in fits of laughter. What do they call it, schedenfreude? Oh dear. I hope your next trip is better - and stay away from that NASTY tourist “food”
Poor bastard. Such vivid detail though, what a talent!
I had something similar happen three new year eve’s in a row. One year I lost 10kgs in a week.
On the Gold Coast.
Good Lord! You poor devil. I’ve had atrocious gastro twice this Winter and felt your misery at every word. Mind you, saying that I don’t think I’ve LOL’d so often over a post, ever. Good fodder for the book, perhaps?
You sure sound like you had a really really bad case of Dubai Belly. It did provide for a funny story and some awful images in my head. Hope you get better soon so that you can go eat at the Michelin restaurant.
Barbara, funnily enough I think we were lost in the desert for a while. Lol!
AOF, funnily enough my complexion is exceptionally clear right now.
Neil, don’t fear last night fresh fois gras Michelin starred restaurant.Fucking amazing. Coming soon…and I kept it in.
Jack, usually I’d have the whole kit but I thought “what can happen in two days in Dubai?” A lot apparently.
Ran, I would have loved an injection. I did think about checking myself into hospital at one point but for the fact I had to catch a plane.
Stickyfingers, that sounds like sticky trousers although at least unlike a good friend of mine it wasn’t at work. I would usually have gastrolyte but thought I wouldn’t need it for two days. Never again.
utsi, sadly my hotel and mother were the only victims. Emirates got off lightly.
Esz, allin well now and I have learnt my lesson.
Ken, now you won’t find this kind of detail in The Age or the Herald Sun for that matter. I guess that’s what editors are for. Or blogs.
Hunty, on the Gold Coast. Where? I could do with droping ten under controlled conditions though.
Jen, well maybe I do keep the title. Thanks to this incident it may work quite well.
Thanh, got to the Michelin restaurant - three times! Posts coming soon. It’s a food hiot everyday in the UK but at a price.
At my parents in Carrara. No idea where I picked it up but it is impossible to eat anything really different there so it wasn’t some dodgy back alley restaurant like here in London.
I also managed to get it in once in Singapore (I have been there dozens of times). The occasion was to ask my wife for her hand in marriage, and subsequently for some Immodium.
I have found a way to lose 65Kgs in a year. Gastric bypass. Works a treat, until you travel in France where the sheer volume of sugary and fatty foods make your newly arranged insides try and turn themselves inside out. You learn the hard way sometimes…
So much for the right underpants for the *prevailing conditons*, Ed!
Perhaps you could craft a snow dome using the soiled iPhone?
You poor man!
I had a very similar experience (complete with the fever etc) and lost about 6 - 7 kg in 5 days. The only good (?) thing was that it didnt ruin any holiday I was on because I got the food poisoning at home in Melbourne. Dodgy duck from Supper Inn.
Giddyup,
I was going to say at least you were at home. But it is appalling for this sort of thing to happen in Melbounre - I’m surprised about the Supper In though. How long after - it usualy takes 6-24 hours for it to kick in.
Yep. Ate wednesday night and by thursday evening i was making friends with the toilet. Probably about 10 hours for it to start kicking in properly. I saw a doctor on friday who said that there wasnt much you can do, just try to keep up the fluids. I have eaten at the Supper Inn since and havent had a problem.