Good Intestinal Health

I did muse on whether to name this post after the elephant in the traveller's room, but ultimately broke under the pressure.

When we took our expensive Malarone antimalarials (new, and nobody has a reaction to them), Clare got the rashes and I got an upset stomach. I don't know that it was those pills, but couldn't work out what else it could be. A couple of days later, I was improving and Clare's tummy turned bad. Then the pendulum swung back and finally we were both bad. We thought we must be re-infecting each other and stopped sharing everything!

We were feeling pretty good when we arrived in La Paz. We'd fully recovered from the tummy upsets and were looking forward.

La Paz is not the capital of Bolivia (that's Santa Cruz). It's grown up the sides of a huge, deep ravine escalating from "just" 9,800 ft to nearly 13,500 ft. With a population of almost 900,000, the city finally spilled out far beyond the top. This makes for incredible views down across the ravine/city and as many photos as would fit in an all-too-brief coach stop.

Bolivia is easily the least developed country we're visiting on this leg, and as easily seems to have the worst traffic. Guide Lucho took us and the Aussie ladies, very slowly due to the traffic, to a really nice restaurant for the last night of our tour, with excellent menu spanning most Asian countries. At his urging, we rounded off the meal with cocktails (with which we might normally have started, but didn't). We retired comfortable.

That lasted until about 3 a.m., when we had to rush from the bed in quick succession. We had eaten nothing in common, so can only accuse those cocktails. We were laid low the whole of the following day, and on the day after (our last in La Paz) we were both so weak from illness and so troubled by the altitude that we could walk only a short distance in search of food. We settled on exotic, local sandwiches from Subway.

So I can't tell you a lot more about La Paz - cheaper and less developed than lovely Peru, hence more "different" from home (in a spot-the-changes sense); awful traffic; I don't regret going there; our ailments haven't given it a fair chance, but I don't imagine we'll return.

With caution, and chemical assistance, we survived the plane trip via warm, 1,400-ft Santa Cruz to sea-level Buenos Aires.

The contrast from Belize, Peru or Bolivia was immediately obvious. We could have been in any major European airport ( I was reminded of Amsterdam Schipol). The roads and driving standards were European too (in our flat-fee, credit-card-paid taxi), as was much of the architecture as we worked our way into the town.

Various observations about Buenos Aires will have to wait, as I return to my theme. We scheduled 3 full days in the city before leaving on our hire-car tour. However, with our tummies still upset, we managed only to visit the Evita Museum on the first day, a truncated stroll downtown on the second and a city bus tour on the third.

Not having reliable tummies overshadows everything, and becomes quite an obsession :-(

I'm mostly fixed now (please God, let it stay that way). Having failed with fasting (in La Paz) and Immodium (here), Clare is now nervously trying to eat normally and waiting for antibiotics to take effect.

The rest of "Leg 1" is in two extensively-adjacent countries, so we hope that things intestinal won't suffer any new negative impacts. Then we'll need no more posts like this (until Leg 2 brings us to China!)