Can't think what put me in mind of this. Don't read if it bores you.
The Sahara is a dry hot place with few water sources. You become very thirsty indeed and can quite easily fall ill from dehydration. At a deep borehole once in the middle of nowhere, shared some extremely sweet, deliciously cool water with a group of agreeable, er, locals for want of a better word.
I did notice that the drinking vessel was a scratched blue soft-polythene bowl, none too clean. But thirst conquers all inhibition in places like that. And the water tasted so lovely. But oh dear me, within hours I was already in the grip of two or three days of absolute galloping diarrhoea.
Another time, in Nigeria, I ate a forkful or two of sort of curried bean stuff before my host snatched it away saying: 'You can't eat that!', and cuffed the boy who had obtained the beans in the street. He was too late: I came down with serious rumbling gut parasite stuff that came back to London with me and turned out to be toxicara, a common gut parasite carried by domestic pet dung everywhere including here. The Tropical Diseases hospital tittered a bit and gave me pills which cured it immediately.
Our doctors at the time were two women who operated in the square where Tony Blair lives, or has a house anyway. They were perfectly nice to Herself but one in particular went out of her way to be rude to me. Nasty old dyke.
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>> But oh dear me, within hours I was already in the grip of two or three days of absolute galloping diarrhoea.
You may be thinking tsk, little go of squits, what's the big deal? Actually I don't know if the water itself gave me the squits or sharing a drinking vessel with chaps resistant to those bugs and carrying them.
It's a much bigger deal than you might expect when you're a guest in someone's tent or house. People are decent and avert their gaze as you blunder foreignly about, but it's awful having to walk half a mile to find a watercourse giving enough cover for a pony or even just a slash, and then half a mile back.
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...what about if you thought you'd finished, as often one does then the rumble takes over and then you have to return to the 'hole' and then have to re-return to establish your course home. Would the culprit pay the additional mileage?
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It's hideous, something like that. You get dehydrated and malnourished, and the explosive Scheisse flow keeps you awake so you get knackered. Plus, if you aren't at home, you have to try to minimize the impact on your hosts or the hotel.
As I said, the locals even in places where actual localities are few and far between are decent and sympathetic. But there's a bit of annoyed anxiety too, no one wants to have to evacuate a moribund foreigner if it turns out to be necessary. A foreigner become dead weight is a serious drain on slender resources.
It was gruelling when I was 30 or 40. It would prostrate me now I reckon. Glad my adventuring days are over in a way.
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half a mile?
I have on several occasions described the seriousness of immediate need as a radius of uncertainty. On one memorable event, my estimated radius of 5m was over optimistic:(=
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Oh its so not funny is it. :(
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>> half a mile?
Perhaps I exaggerate. I do sometimes. Anyway, 200 to 500 yards. It's hard work finding a private place in a flat trackless waste. There are sort of creases in the ground, but they may be a long way off.
A gandoura or some other kind of all-enveloping robe serves the locals. I couldn't manage properly even in one of those.
Of course if you have the squits there's extra urgency. But you can't leave that kind of spoor five metres from the tent or house, even under pressure. You owe it to people to get off a bit.
I found a place near a refugee camp in the desert, a sort of hill obviously used before for the purpose. The desert men told me a bit scornfully that it was a place where 'the women' tended to excrete.
They can really flatter you, those desert chaps. Oh yes!
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Green in the face anyway - Armel Coussine
