The Turk Who Loved Apples (9 page)

Still, however, I felt flummoxed at mealtimes, and too often wound up eating at the foreign restaurants in the backpacker and tourist districts. They were all surprisingly good: fresh tomatoes and basil made for excellent Italian, a devoted expatriate clientele demanded serious Japanese, and a century of French colonialism meant pâté, red wine, and onion soup were vernacular dishes. But put together, they all reminded me of my ongoing failure to penetrate Vietnamese culture.

Which still might not have been so bad—had I not been constantly sick as well. My guts had begun to rebel a few days after I arrived in Vietnam, during a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels, where Viet Cong guerrillas hid underground during the war. The journey took forty-five minutes on the back of a motorbike, and at first I mistook my intestinal rumblings for vibrations from the rough road out of town. But once I arrived and started to clamber awkwardly through the tunnels, like any other less-than-limber Westerner, I knew something was wrong. Only through sheer sphincteric fortitude
did I forge on: I saw the underground hospital and the underground mess hall, and I was properly amazed that human beings had spent so much time—years, in some cases—down here, going about the day-to-day processes of their lives in the bowels of the earth. They ate, slept, plotted strategy, survived shelling, set booby-traps, and even, as I remember it, watched movies underground, until one day the war was over and they emerged, flowing en masse into the sunlight. The release, I imagined, must have been wonderful. For the ride home to the Lucy, I took a taxi, not a moped.

Returning to my home toilet was not enough, however. For days my guts cramped up, I belched unceasingly, and my diarrhea—well, let's just say I had diarrhea. Finally, I'd had enough. Through the English-language newspapers, I located a Dutch doctor who diagnosed my troubles instantly: I had giardiasis.

Now, before I'd left the States, I'd taken some health precautions: vaccinations for typhoid, Hep A, Japanese encephalitis. On a Virginia doctor's advice, I'd even started taking Lariam, a malaria prophylactic also known as mefloquine. (Neither of us understood there were no malarial swamps in Saigon.) But none of those had protected me from the shrimp curry I'd eaten that first night in Saigon. Or the
ph
I'd been eating daily. Or the ground-pork omelette at the cute little Thai restaurant around the corner. Or the tap water I used to brush my teeth. Or the fat chunks of ice in my beer—ice that had been produced in sterile factory conditions, then zipped across town on the back of a motorbike, protected from the grit and dust only by a filthy damp piece of canvas. Or the fact that I used to bite my nails unthinkingly.

Any and all of which could have installed in my gut the protozoan parasite known as
Giardia lamblia
. A single-celled creature that is one of the most primitive organisms on the planet, it lives in the intestinal tracts of both humans and animals, and passes from host to host through water contaminated with feces. Under a microscope, the flagellated anaerobe looks like a pair of buttocks with five legs and
a cape. And its macro effects were precisely what I'd experienced, give or take a bit of vomiting.

In my case, the only strange factor was that I'd gotten sick so quickly: According to the Centers for Disease Control, it takes one to two weeks for giardiasis symptoms to emerge. But I didn't care what Atlanta had to say—if the Dutchman said he could cure my giardiasis, I was willing to believe him. He prescribed a five-day course of the antibiotic metronidazole. I bought the metronidazole. I took the metronidazole. And voilà! I was better.

For a little while.

Within days, the diarrhea was back. I took more drugs, it went away. Then it came back again. For at least the first half of the year I spent in Vietnam, I had the shits.

This wasn't quite as bad as it sounds. After all, there's nothing travelers in Third World countries love more than discussing their bowels. The subject was an icebreaker at scuzzy cafés, and if you couldn't top your tablemates' tales of gastrointestinal woe, then it was like you were excluded from the club of real travelers. You hadn't earned your stripes, even if those stripes were skid marks.

In more genteel establishments, outside the backpacker hangouts, digestion was a topic, too, but eased into via coded language. “So, how's your health?” “Do you eat street food?” “Do you brush your teeth with tap water or bottled?”

These were tentative forays, designed to identify those like-minded masochists who reveled in their suffering. If the right response was given, then we could get down to business, describing foul squat toilets in the Mekong Delta, or a frantic search for Imodium in the Central Highlands. I'll spare you the florid descriptions of exactly what emerged from whose rear end, and how, but trust me, they were rarely pretty.

But as much as gastrointestinal distress enabled us to communicate, I quickly got bored by these conversations. They were always the same: sad tales, misguided notions of health and hygiene, often
tinged with racism—this idea that natives could and would eat anything, no matter how filthy, because their stomachs had been born into it. Which was totally ridiculous if you ever talked to any so-called natives, or watched young kids squatting uncomfortably at the edge of the sidewalk. In communist Vietnam, diarrhea was democratic.

Pretty soon, despite my own struggles with my guts, I began to shrug off those coded openings. The experience of diarrhea had a discouraging sameness, and I almost never heard any variations on the theme: tourist eats something, gets sick, complains, gets better, complains.

And besides, no one's symptoms really seemed to match mine, because while I had diarrhea, I would also get . . . constipated. Yes, I would race to the bathroom, sit (or squat), and then nothing. Until later, perhaps, maybe, if I was lucky. My god, what frustration! Why couldn't my body make up its mind?

Desperate, I eventually returned to the Dutch doctor, where I happened to mention for the first time that I was also taking Lariam, the anti-malarial medication. Immediately, he whipped out the
Physician's Desk Reference
, the thick black encyclopedia of commercially available drugs. He flipped through to Lariam, turned the book around, and directed me to the section marked “Side Effects.”

Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea—and constipation. Hm. Dizziness. Sleepiness, insomnia. Anxiety, nervousness, light-headedness. Ah. Nightmares, hallucinations, psychotic episodes. Well.

I hadn't experienced all of these, but taking a potentially anxiety-provoking drug when you've just moved to a new country where you don't speak the language, don't know anyone, and aren't sure what you're supposed to be doing seemed like a bad idea. I quit Lariam, and the intestinal problems went away . . . for a while.

Then they returned, and vanished, and returned again, a low-grade torture that wore on me mentally. Sometimes I would take more drugs, but usually I'd just try to tough it out. I remember one particularly sleepless, wretched night where that telltale gurgle in my
lower abdomen would just not stop. I'd get out of my bed, in my un-air-conditioned room on the top floor of the Lucy Hotel, and stumble into the bathroom, and . . . nothing. Then I'd stumble back to bed until 20 minutes later the gurgle would return.

I did everything possible to relax myself, from breathing deeply to taking a shower (a lukewarm one, as I didn't have hot water) to, at one low, desperate point, masturbating. (FYI: Didn't work.) Somehow, though, I forgot that rich, intensely caffeinated Vietnamese iced coffee could be ordered from the street and brought to my room—a delicious laxative I never partook of in those hours of need.

Too toilet-bound to go out at night, I'd turn in early—and lie there, sleepless, listening to the churn in my bowels, wishing I could cure this blight with a single pill, but also knowing that if only I could hang on, keep my shit together (so to speak), I'd get better, become my old, robust self again, and get back to the important business of living and eating.

And I did.

But as I traveled farther and farther afield over the next twenty-five years, my health failed again and again, although, to be sure, this didn't always happen. Many—most—trips have involved no sickness at all, but when they did, I never became the guy, sidelined by Montezuma's revenge, who ruins everyone else's good time. I was never hospitalized. I never cut the voyage short. I put up with it, as all travelers must at one time or another. We get sick—the rigors and discomforts and adjustments inherent in the experience of travel pretty much guarantee that some microscopic bug will eventually overcome our immune systems and wreak havoc. And it's how we deal with the horrors of our own haywire bodies that toughens us as travelers, even as it weakens us as human beings.

More than once, it's been the flu, the symbol of international contagion, that struck me down. For example, on New Year's Eve 1999, when a group of friends and I traveled to Cambodia to watch ten thousand chanting monks welcome the new millennium in the
sandstone temples of Angkor Wat. Or anyway, that's what they did. I spent the night sweating and shivering in my hotel room, while my pals were busy partying until dawn with Malaysian princesses.

But I've also had colds—the kind that simply rob you of energy and will without actually being severe—and allergy attacks and bug bites (including a yucky chigger infestation), not to mention the occasional extraordinarily close call. Near the end of my year in Vietnam, I visited the beach town of Nha Trang, where I spent a day scuba diving and snorkeling with no sunscreeen and little drinking water. By the time I returned to my hotel, I had a neck-to-ankle sunburn, a 103-degree fever, and a case of dehydration so severe my hotel called in a Vietnamese doctor to help. As I watched him fiddle with the I.V. saline drip, panic struck: Letting a Vietnamese doctor put a needle in you was the last thing the guidebooks said you should do! (By then I'd discovered guidebooks.) In delirium-addled French—my only means of communication with the doctor—I pleaded with him to make sure the needle was clean and that the tube had no air bubbles. He nodded and told me not to worry—he'd trained in Paris.

Reader, I lived! And throughout the next few weeks, when every crinkle of my lobstered back raked my nerve endings, I remember thinking—as I would think each time I caught the flu, or when my feet blistered as I walked from Vienna to Budapest, or when in Minneapolis bolts of pain shot through my skull during a stress-induced bout of shingles soon after my daughter was born—that there was only one consolation:
at least I don't have giardiasis
.

Because
Giardia lamblia
never gave up its pursuit. In 2003, its visit left me pale and weak, perched on tiptoes over a railroad car's toilet in a New Delhi train station, and four years later it had me vomiting all night into another Indian toilet, outside Darjeeling, in the Himalayas. Giardia intruded on a vacation with my wife as we drove from Mexico City down to Oaxaca and up the Pacific coast; while Jean ate tongue tacos at highway rest stops and backstroked
in Acapulco swimming pools, I lay in pools of cold sweat, subsisting on Gatorade. And then, each morning,
I
would be the one to drive us to the next town, racing over dry roads and crushing lizards and curb-like speed bumps under the wheels of our rental car, wondering what was real and what I'd just imagined in my bacterial haze. Twice, giardia even ambushed me
before
my journeys began, one time striking the night before a flight to Switzerland, another appearing out of nowhere two days before a road trip to Maine. Once, in Kenya's Rift Valley, giardia kindly waited until my last day there before enveloping me in its ungentle flagella.