But… this is us. So instead I’m whining about my cold.

For currently we are hacking up our lungs in Pokhara, looking up at the Annapurna range towering over Lake Fewa, already glistening with a dusting of snow, and wondering when we’ll be well enough to commit to a flight into Lukla.

(Lukla is, fact fans, the start of the Everest Base Camp trail, unless you fancy adding another six days and 9000-odd vertical metres by walking in from the nearest bus stop. Which, much as I’d like to cut our carbon footprint, neither of us do.)

The longer we leave it, you see, the chillier it gets up there.

But it would be absolutely insane to head to altitude in mid-November with a cold, or even the vaguest hint of a chest on either of us.

And so, we’re kind of stuck. We’re not at death’s door, mark you.

But there’s no point in heading south, where there are rhinos and tigers, as that means giving up on Everest.

There’s no point in flying into Lukla, or even booking flights, until we’re well.

Kathmandu ain’t conducive to a cough.

Now, whining notwithstanding, Pokhara is a beautiful place. With a gadzillion attractions. There’s whitewater rafting, whitewater kayaking, kayaking classes, paragliding, yoga, hiking, dazzling sunsets and sunrises, interesting museums…

None of which are best appreciated while expectorating crud left, right and centre and working through a small forest of tissues.

In normal life, one would be forcing oneself out of the door to go to work/school. But forcing oneself out of the door to go whitewater rafting, trekking, kayaking?

Nuh-uh.

I don’t mean to whine.

Well, actually, I do, cos having a cold sucks.

And whining about my cold makes me feel better.

But, frankly, we haven’t had the best year, health-wise.

It is, with hindsight, entirely predictable that I’d come down with some kind of cough, or, as I prefer to call it, an Upper Respiratory Infection, the second I hit a climate that was anything less than tropical.

Most visitors to Kathmandu at this time of year do, and given I’ve caught colds acquired respiratory infections from Spain, China, Australia, Bulgaria and Blighty over the last twelve months, it would seem remiss of me to leave Nepal without adding that to my tally of disease.

But it’s not usual for Zac to get colds.

And, given that since the last bout of colds, we’ve had a car crash (concussion and mild scarring – me), minor surgery (Zac) and dehydration (Zac), it all seems, well, a little unfair.

That said, life could be worse.

It is better to be hacking up a lung and emitting mucus from multiple orifices here than on a trekking trail. During the day, the weather can be as crisp, blue and sunshine-warm as an English June, the kind of pure sunlight that makes you turn your face to it and bathe in it.

Pokhara is a beautiful place. The Nepalese are lovely. The food is excellent. And Diwali, which I’ll write about, was entertaining even in our enfeebled state.

And, let’s face it, it’s not as if our plague is uncommon.

Round about 5.30am, our guesthouse springs into life in a maelstrom of early morning coughing reminiscent of a Dickensian workhouse full of oversized tubercular orphans.

And, you know, we could be like the poor guy in the Chinese restaurant last night. The one who vomited all over his table – in not one, but several installments — so loudly and copiously that I almost joined him.

And then, which is just bizarro, seemed absolutely unembarrassed by this occurrence.

I mean, seriously, even in Nepal, after round one you’re going to make it to the bathroom, right? Right? (It was a nice bathroom. With a throne, running water, and everything.)

One thing I am longing for, oddly, is Chinese medicine. Reading this post left me desperate for the terrifying efficacy of Chinese concoctions – because if there’s one thing the Chinese know about, it’s colds.

Earthworm and human placenta? Bring it on!

Here in Nepal, we’re on Western medicine, which, as Zac points out, doesn’t work on colds.

And Western medicine times about ten. I should probably have gone and found some Tibetan healer and given that a go, astrology and all.

But no. I went to the pharmacy to pick up some Vitamin C and throat sweets and ended up on a gramme and a half of Amoxycillin daily plus Zac’s bodyweight in pseudoephedrine.

Zac? Well, he flat-out refused to take antibiotics without a doctor’s prescription — “No doctor’s going to prescribe antibiotics for a cold…” “We’re in NEPAL! The PHARMACISTS are giving out antibiotics like sweeties, what do you think the doctor’s going to do?” — so he’s on honey and lemon and inhaling Strepsils, both through a cheap Chinese surgical mask.

On the plus side, I’ve given up smoking. I was planning to do this en route to Everest Base Camp, so bringing the date forward seemed to make sense.

And I’m guessing the boy and I will get well at about the same time…

He turns 12 on Monday, so I’m hoping it’s in time for then. He’s planning on paragliding, so wish him luck.

The post In Pokhara – with the Plague appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

In the Sinai, we walked in the footsteps of Moses; we trailed Cleopatra down the Nile; assuming Israel lets us in, we’ll be seeing both Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

But to see Tyre and Sidon, the ancient cities of the Phoenicians? To me, that’s like reaching Xanadu.

Even if almost all that remains of their culture is their legends, like their huntress goddess Astarte and her lover Adonis, whose blood still turns the river by the caves of Jeita red each spring.

Now, my degree was in Latin, Ancient Greek and Philosophy, a discipline I suspect may be in decline now young Brits actually have to pay for their studies.

And Tyre was the home of Tyrian purple, the dye made from the murex shell that coloured the cloaks of Roman emperors, tinted the curtains of Solomon’s temple and draped Helen of Troy.

Dido was born here, before she founded Hannibal’s Carthage and fell so destructively in love with Aeneas, the ancestor of the folk who razed Carthage to the ground.

Sidon was home to Jezebel, the “harlot”; Paris and Helen spent their honeymoon there.

Jesus withdrew to the cities of Tyre and Sidon; ancient prophets called down curses on them; Nebuchadnezzar razed them to the ground.

All in all — and, you should, by now, know how very, very much I love Lebanon travel — to be on the trail of the Phoenicians was exciting.

With these high hopes, though, Sidon (Saïda in Arabic) was… well, a letdown.

Honestly, with its dinky little Crusader sea castle, its beautiful Old Town, its palaces, its restored Ottoman inn and an absolutely fabulous soap museum, Sidon should have been wonderful.

And would be, if we visited again.

As it happens, the circumstances were less than ideal. I was feeling most atypically vomitous, the first time in years this has happened to me without mixing beer, red wine and dark spirits, or being pregnant. (For the record, I hadn’t, and I’m not.)

And, without wanting to whine overly, Lebanese roundabouts are difficult enough to negotiate when you’re not being sick in your mouth at the precise moment the guy who’s parked on the roundabout pulls out in front of the guy in front of you and someone else decides to cut the crap and take the shortcut (clockwise) to his exit.

There are, I think, five of the suckers in Sidon.

Further, of the two non-horrid affordable hotels in town, one was closed and the other’s manager was out of town.

Now, I like a nice hotel as much as the next person, but paying for one simply to worship the porcelain god in relative comfort was… well, less than ideal.

Ahem.

Moving swiftly on… We were in Sidon for the Temple of Echmoun, the Phoenician god of healing, which boasts the best-preserved Phoenician ruins in the world.

These are them:

Yeah, the square thing.

That’s the base of an enormous temple, long ago cannibalised by waves of incomers.

Which doesn’t, IMHO, vaut le voyage. Or even le hotel.

Tyre, on the other hand?

Now, Tyre is somewhere I could easily spend a week.

And if it weren’t for my parallel parking skills, we would never have discovered its joys…

The post On the Trail of the Phoenicians – Sidon appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Oysters in Thailand. Ceviche in Kenya. Mysterious stews in Guatemalan eateries with pigs foraging in the mud around the tables, rare beef pho in fly-filled noodle joints — bring it on!

“Swine flu?” I’d say, dismissively. “Had that when it first came to the UK. Bit of a sore throat, went to bed, right as rain 24 hours later…”

“Street food?” I’d begin. “I don’t know why people whinge on about eating street food. I’ve NEVER got sick from street food. Comes from eating dirt as a baby and not being hung up on hygiene…”

But, I hate to say it (and, yes, I know whining about minor ailments has been bit of a theme lately, and all I can say in mitigation is that you’re lucky you haven’t had to spend time with me IRL and I PROMISE this will be the last one), this is no longer the case.

My immune system has gone sub-tropical. My leukocytes are, basically, knackered. They’ve been so busy chasing after potential tummy bugs in Asia that they’re crashing like flies before even the weediest cold bug.

And I’ve had a truly international selection of those lately…

EXHIBIT 1: THE BEIJING COLD (NOVEMBER)

Go to Beijing in winter, and you’re going to get a cold (unless you’re my spawn, of course, who has the constitution of an ox). There’s world class smog, temperatures below zero, and 25 million people in the city, most of them, often, fighting to get on the same bus as you. And, while the whole snotting and spitting thing in China can be overplayed — it’s not like the 70s, when buses were routinely ankle-deep in mucus during winter — colds do the rounds. Big time.

Now, when I get a cold, I don’t really tend to do anything about it, an attitude that I occasionally conflate with stoicism. I mean, I whine, obviously. I whine A LOT. I wallow in bed and self pity reading books. But I don’t do any of that crap like, umm, taking medicine, or seeing a doctor — well, except with this one I couldn’t really breathe properly, so I went to a pharmacist. A CHINESE pharmacist. The prescription of earthworm, human placenta and deactivated bacteria, remarkably, worked.

EXHIBIT 2: THE AUSTRALIAN COLD (DECEMBER)

Our last stop in Asia was with lovely friends in Singapore. One of whom brought back a particularly unlovely cold from Australia, which I developed pretty much on arrival in the UK.

It wasn’t an epic cold. Just one of those snotty ones that — and I blame diving for this — rapidly migrated to my sinuses. If you haven’t had a sinus headache, I must congratulate you. They’re up there with migraines on the horror show factor, and the only thing that really works is codeine. Lots of it. Codeine, unfortunately, is the sort of fun drug that you can’t really get in the UK without seeing a doctor, so I suffered in — well, not exactly silence — until it stopped.

EXHIBIT 3: THE BRITISH COLD (DECEMBER-JANUARY)

Now, I’m not sure who I got this one from. But it settled in right after Christmas, generating some absolutely delightful phlegm, a hawking cough that woke the entire house up, a general feeling of malaise and the sort of sinus headaches that make it feel like there’s an elephant in your head trying to break its way out.

Now, it is not (to put it mildly) unusual for one to acquire a cold in Britain in the winter, when the native population tends to wander around hunched, miserable and mainlining pseudo-ephedrine with an enthusiasm normally devoted to tea or tap lager, and folk from overseas make resolutions never to return again.

But it was at this point, gentle reader, that I realised my immune system was not what it used to be. And began, perhaps belatedly (and, yes, I am a fan of vaccines), to wonder whether one of the reasons I rarely got sick before was because I had a flu jab every year.

EXHIBIT 4: BULGARIAN FLU (JANUARY-FEBRUARY)

How was I to know that Sofia was in the grip of a flu epidemic when we visited Bulgaria? Well, when I got it of course — doh!

Bulgarian flu, I can safely say (and my poor dad can confirm) is a bitch. A real, bona fide flu of the sort that, before paracetamol, killed a lot of people. Aches. Shivers. Hideous semi-waking fever dreams. 39.5° temperature (that’s over 103° for Fahrenheit folk).

Oh, and then it went to the lungs. Where it settled so savagely that I was (and had I not invested in shedloads of cheap Bulgarian cigarettes, this could have been an amazing turning point for me) for THREE WHOLE DAYS incapable of smoking.

I tried, mark you. I tried, despite realising, each time I took a tentative drag and my lungs exploded in rivers of liquid pain, that if I don’t stop some time, one day my lungs will feel like this all the time…

But I digress. (And, please, please don’t ask me when I plan to give up smoking.) I was out for four days and not good for a few days after that. My poor dad was in bed for the big end of a week and has only just gone back to normal. And even Z was a bit croaky with a slight fever for, ooh, about three hours…

My mum? Well SHE had had the flu jab…

EXHIBIT 5: THE SPANISH COLD (FEBRUARY)

It was really lovely to see my gorgeous cousin and her spawn, Z’s gorgeous little cousins, the other weekend. Bit of a shame she had a stinking cold, mind you. Not just for her. But — because, frankly, this is ALL ABOUT ME — for me.

“Don’t hug me!” I said hysterically. “I’ll get it! I’ve had four colds since November and this is beyond a joke!”

“Oh, you’ve probably got immunity to this one, then,” she said, caringly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been out of the country for two years.”

“Well, this one’s from Spain,” she said.

This one? Well, it’s not actually that bad. Bit of a cough. Bit shaky. Sucking back snot. Spitting gunk like, well, like a Chinese person, really. But, y’know, I haven’t needed to go to bed. Or a doctors. Or anything…

ANYWISE… NEXT TIME I’M GETTING A FLU SHOT

So… next time I travel in winter, particularly in Northern Europe, I’m getting a flu shot.

Getting sick is a pain in the butt when you’re freelance (or digital nomading) — it hits your income, generates a logjam of back work and leaves you constantly chasing your tail.

More importantly, though, I feel like I’ve hardly had any quality time with friends and family, I’ve seen almost nothing of the country that I wanted to see, there are people I’ve hardly caught up with and some I haven’t seen at all.

And that sucks. Badly.

We are off to Egypt in two sleeps. Where it will be — yay! — warm! Although they have flu there, too. Bird flu. I will be steering well clear of poultry farms.

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