I came down with a terrible ailment: Sickness in Sayaboury

December 6, 2014

The next morning I came down with some terrible ailment or other - as we returned to the restaurant for a noodle breakfast I came over all faint and had to go back to my bed and lie down. I felt really rather rotten and decided that I had definitely been afflicted by some tropical fever, but the guesthouse was a bad one and the town a small one, and noticing that the much larger town of Sayaboury was a mere forty kilometres down the road and seeing as it was likely that there were medical professionals and pharmaceuticals in Sayaboury I thought I should do my best to get there while my strength held.

So we cycled onwards as a four, although I lagged a bit, struggling as I was with a headache, nausea and a poorly stomach. The hot sun did nothing at all to help alleviate these symptoms and I had to stop often although I had no appetite to eat anything. Dea patiently waited for me, but I told Suzy and Dino to go on to Sayaboury where they planned to eat lunch before pushing on. Their visas were almost at an end and they needed now to hurry along to Thailand, so this was going to be our last morning together. And I use the word 'together' quite wrongly because from then on they were nowhere to be seen as I laboured along painfully. It was a dire struggle for me, those last few kilometres, but finally I made it to the town and found my companions sitting in the shade of a restaurant.

We crossed a big bridge over the Mekong. Still no sign of Robin!

It might look nice, but it was a struggle!

I joined them at their table and we exchanged the photographs that we had taken over the previous week. Suddenly I came over feeling much worse than before. The restaurant began to feel incredibly hot and I had a terrible urge to vomit and yet there was no clear place to do so and I really did feel bad, so bad in fact that I decided that I absolutely must be suffering from malaria or dengue fever at the very least, but for the moment the only way that I could find to make myself feel any better at all was to catapult myself out over the low wall of the restaurant and lie quietly in the grass outside for a while.

I remained there for the rest of the meal, which I'd had no desire to partake in anyway, until Suzy and Dino had to leave. At this point I managed to stand up and hug them goodbye while apologising for my theatrical behaviour. They said they hoped I would recover soon and then it was farewell and so long, and it was just me and Dea again. With her help I crawled to the nearest guesthouse, which happened to be right next door, and it was a good one with a fan and wifi and a TV and a sit-down toilet and a big comfortable bed, which I immediately laid down on with no intentions of moving from for a good long while, except perhaps occasionally when nature called me to the sit-down toilet.

The wifi was very useful for it allowed me to self-diagnose myself and after looking up my symptoms I quickly discovered that, not only was I a victim of both malaria and dengue fever, but also several other diseases including ebola, smallpox and the common cold. Realising just how sick I was I told Dea we had better check into the guesthouse for at least a couple of nights and she was, as befits the sweetest girl in the world, very sympathetic to my plight and stroked my forehead and made promises to look after me.

Now I don't know about you but when I'm all on my own and I get sick I tend to be able to do a pretty good job of getting on with things and looking after myself but when I happen to fall ill in the presence of someone else, particularly someone that has made the mistake of promising to look after me, I have terrible trouble doing anything for myself and I flail about the bed and protest about being too weak to do anything for myself, and get very annoyed when I can't find the TV remote and complain about many other such things. Luckily for me Dea remained very patient with me and never lost her cool or her good cheer and she simply dug out the TV remote that I'd been lying on and gave it back to me and stroked my hair some more.

We ended up staying in Sayaboury for four nights. It was a good place to rest and there was a great market in town, just across from where we were staying, that at first Dea just told me about, but after a couple of days I was feeling sufficiently recovered as to go and take a look at for myself. It was certainly an interesting place with a whole variety of fruits and vegetables, bread, noodles, insects, and all that good stuff. Sayaboury seemed to be a much wealthier town than we had seen in other parts of the country, for reasons that were not clear to either of us, and there were a lot of big houses and big cars testifying to that.

We didn't see much traffic in Laos, but almost all of the cars were big 4x4 pick-up trucks, the most obvious sign of the big gap between rich and poor. There was no in between, either you've got a big car, or you don't

We made it down to the river for a drink one day. Dea might have been getting a bit bored by now

Our extended stay in Sayaboury now meant that we had less time to get to Vientiane before Dea's flight out of Laos on the 15th of December, but we still had enough time so long as nothing else went wrong, and our stay in Sayaboury had not been entirely without benefit. I can assure you that lounging around on a big double bed with the most beautiful girl in the world is something that can still be enjoyed even with such a terrible sickness as I suffered and, in actual fact, I believe this favorable situation was a major factor in my eventual recovery, something that may be of interest to the medical community. I also think our time together in Sayaboury brought Dea and I closer together and she even wrote a song during these days about our experience in Laos. It was the first song that she had ever written and when she played it to me, strumming the strings of her ukulele and piercing the air with her beautiful voice, the passion and deep feeling that she transmitted to me through the music made me well up inside. We had something really special here, and I wasn't ready for it to end so soon.

Today's ride: 36 km (22 miles)
Total: 34,556 km (21,459 miles)

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