So. I woke up at 4am on this day extremely nauseous and pretty much spent the next three hours in the bathroom trying not to wake up Hali. I was SICK. Really sick. I could hardly move without needing to vomit. Naturally, I was really freaking out. When Hali and Caitlyn woke up, they discovered how sick I really was and immediately went to go find Jim. It took them a little bit as they had to search the entire hotel. At last, he arrived. He asked me a number of questions, told me it was probably food sickness, but if I felt like I had a fever, I should start taking my dysentery medication.
Needless to say, I was a little nervous. I finally figured out, however, that the supposed veggie burger I had eaten the night before was what got me sick. There were unpeeled carrots slices on the burger—the carrot must have been washed in local water (rather than bottled) which is what made me so sick. When I was eating however, I was so apathetic about what I was eating (and so hungry) I hadn’t been cautious enough to catch that the carrot was unpeeled.
When I got down into the hotel lobby (finally, it was quite the effort), I discovered that Linda, the 60-year-old choir teacher, was sick as well. Evidently, she ordered the same thing I did. I felt bad about this, but it was also comforting to know that I wasn’t the only one dealing with this. So we suffered it out together.
So, essentially, all eight hours of driving that we did that day was spent in absolute misery. The bumpy dirt roads were unendurable—thankfully the last half of it was pavement. Eating anything, even thinking about eating, made me want to puke again. Thankfully, I wasn’t sick during our adventures, but I did not feel very good. Oy.
The group made several stops during the day, but I stayed in the vehicle during these short excursions to sleep because I was feeling so poorly. We made a quick stop at a nunnery, a small Tibetan farm, and an incense factory along the way. When we stopped to eat lunch, I just laughed. Jim made me eat a banana because he told me it would make me feel better. I assented only because he said he had had food sickness before. The rest of the trip was spent in a sleep-hazed, sweaty blur. When we got to the hotel, I honestly just crawled into bed and passed out. And slept for about eleven hours to twelve hours. Best sleep of my life.
And that was the end of day 12.