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Date:
May 5, 2003
I am composing this email while sick in my hotel but temporarily lucid.
The high altitude, freezing temperatures and poor hygiene have kept me
perpetually sick for months. In India, I had boils, or ulcers, on my
legs from thorn scratches that became infected. These are extremely
painful sores that ooze blood and pus and cause your leg to swell into
painful proportions. It took three doctors and three rounds of
antibiotics to heal these buggers, just in time to be host to a dozen
new illnesses in Tibet. Currently, I've lost my voice and have a drooly
piece of snot that goes in and out of my nose like a yo-yo, same as
every Tibetian kid. I was so sick that I spent the last three days of
the trip in the truck. I felt so ashamed of myself and angered by
missing the ride into Lhasa that I shed a few tears and felt even more
ashamed and more angry. It was good because I realized that if this is
any indication of what it would feel like to quit my trip around the
world I vowed to die trying. I was just biding my time in the truck.
My main problem is that I can't stay warm. On the first day, it rained.
Soaked, frost biting painfully into my fingers and stomach battling
foriegn particles of feces, I succumbed to my first cold. Afterwhich, I
was never healthy enough to recover. At high altitude, the temperature
drops five degrees per thousand meters yet as the atmosphere thins the
sun radiation becomes more intense. At one moment, in the sun, I begin
to burn and sweat and have to pull the brim of my cap around my
sunglasses; then a moment later the sun disappears behind a cloud and
my sweat begins to freeze. My body temperature goes up and down like
the snot in my nose. I strip clothes on and off for the locals
amusement.
Where do these germs come from? About ten percent of the locals,
especially the Chinese wear face masks to prevent respiratory diseases
but the majority of the population hasn't figured out to simply stop
spitting in the streets or in their shops and restaurants. I went to a
pharmacy indicating that I needed some lozenges when the owner coughs
up a big loogey, spits it on the ground behind the counter and then
rubs it into the floor with his foot. My patience was thin and I let
loose a blue streak of French. Alas, he didn't speak French or English
and just kept trying to sell me cures to respiratory diseases covered
in respiratory diseases.
Another business, a hotel with restaurant, had a small courtyard where
cars were parked, firewood stored and garbage strewn. The urinal was a
trough that drained through a hole in the wall and the crapper was
behind a broken truck that was sunk in the frozen mud and indicated by
the pyramids of frozen crap. Of course there are no sinks so the locals
rinse their hands in water and shake off the excess like a wet dog. If
you are in India, the locals wash their hands over their plate of
leftover food and then spray all their neighbors with flecks of rice
and bacteria. It is almost as disgusting as being served a plate of
food with complimentary flies and being forced to eat it because there
are no sources of food for miles. I assure you, flies swarming around a
restaurant are not flies roaming the desert that coincidentally
happened along a bonanza. They are flies most likely bred just outside
the window next to the stove where the leftover food is dumped.
And, the most disgusting experience of my life: During a break near a
monastery in Tibet (near a cave where an aesthetic monk survived on
lichen for two years until he turned green. Perhaps, he turned green
from his poor hygiene.) there was a typical Tibetian latrene. It is a
two story building, open to the sky and composed of stone. I walked up
the narrow staircase with no handrails (I could write a book on the
occupational saftey and hazards of traveling in the Third World). The
wooden door swung open with a little effort. Inside was a dirt floor
with a hole in the middle where the waste falls down to the first
floor. This two-story construction, as opposed to a simply hole in the
ground, I presumed was necessary because the waste freezes and needs to
be shoveled out. Five piles of crap did not come close to the hole. I
squatted and released trillions of giardia protozoa into the abyss
while staring at the weathered piles of crap and feeling nauseaus. I
heard a sound like running water and looked below, about to make
another deposit, to see a furry Tibetian dog lapping up my
porridge-like stool. Later, I would learn these toilets are made to
accomodate dogs, pigs and, even, yaks. And, you can guess who has been
eating the yaks.
I've had every disease but the disease of the day, Severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS). Though there are no confirmed cases in Tibet but
the Chinese have closed the borders and rumor says they will evict
all foriegners. As of the fourth of May, there have only been 6,100
cases of SARS worldwide and 436 deaths which, in my opinion, makes
this an epidemic of mass hysteria.
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